She spoke Extemp for Flint Powers. She went on to argue the case that opened The Citadel to women.

Valorie Vojdik competed in Extemporaneous Speaking at three straight MIFA State Finals, from 1976 to 1978. She became lead counsel in the lawsuit that opened The Citadel to women, and is now a distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee.

Valorie Vojdik

Flint Powers

Extemporaneous Speaking

Valorie Vojdik competed in Extemporaneous Speaking for Flint Powers at three straight MIFA State Finals, from 1976 to 1978. Within fifteen years she was lead counsel in the lawsuit that opened The Citadel to women.

Brown, then New York

From Flint Powers she went to Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1982 with a degree in Development Studies, an interdisciplinary program on the Global South. She earned her law degree at New York University in 1986 and began as a litigation associate at Shearman & Sterling in New York, where she also helped run the firm’s pro bono program.

Shannon Faulkner, center, in a Citadel T-shirt and shorts, marching with male recruits while a uniformed cadet calls out beside the line — Shannon Faulkner, center, with fellow recruits at The Citadel · The State

The Citadel

In 1992 she took a case for three women Navy veterans whom The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college, had refused to admit to its veterans’ program. The college closed the program rather than let them in. Shannon Faulkner, an eighteen-year-old high school senior, then filed suit with Vojdik as her lawyer, challenging the college’s all-male Corps of Cadets.

The case ran nearly three years. Vojdik argued all of the substantive motions, hearings, trials and appeals, up to the Fourth Circuit, which ruled in 1995 that a public college could not turn women away. At one deposition an older South Carolina lawyer told her she was no lady. She answered that she was a litigator and he was welcome to leave. That August, Faulkner enrolled as the first woman in the Corps of Cadets.

South Carolina’s ACLU named Vojdik its Pro Bono Attorney of the Year in 1993, and the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women gave her a Woman of Power and Influence award in 1997.

Valorie Vojdik smiling in a coral blazer in front of the College of Law building, with the words Equal Justice Under Law carved above her — Outside the University of Tennessee College of Law · University of Tennessee College of Law

Teaching

She began teaching in 1994 in NYU’s Lawyering Program, then taught at Western New England College School of Law, where she directed an antidiscrimination clinic, and at West Virginia University, where she became a professor and associate dean. In 2011 she joined the University of Tennessee College of Law. She directed its clinical programs until 2015, has been its Waller Lansden Distinguished Professor of Law since 2018, and won the college’s Harold Warner Outstanding Teacher Award in 2022. From 2016 to 2024 she also served two terms on the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Valorie Vojdik speaking on the TEDxUTK stage in a lavender sweater, with illustrated doors behind her — Speaking at TEDxUTK · TEDx Talks

Out loud

She has kept speaking in public. In the spring of 1999 she debated single-sex education at Columbia Law School, gave the I. Goodman Cohen lecture at Wayne State in Detroit, and in June debated Susan Estrich on the same question for NPR’s Justice Talking. In a TEDxUTK talk posted in 2020, Are Social Institutions Gendered?, she argued that opening the doors is not enough, because the institutions themselves have to change.

The speech room

Making a case out loud, to people who have not decided yet, is something a lot of students first try in a speech round. Valorie Vojdik made a career of it, in courtrooms, classrooms and on a TEDx stage.