The Virginia Military Institute Alumni Association has suspended several alumni who gained unauthorized access to member records in what the organization describes as a multiyear effort to divert donations away from official campaigns.
The association’s board of directors has not publicly identified the alumni. But a review by Cardinal News of the organization’s correspondence with members, along with documents filed as part of a 2023 circuit court petition seeking access to alumni records, indicate that the association has expelled 1979 graduate Bob Morris, who in recent years has relaunched the student newspaper at the school and sued his alma mater.
Morris had previously attempted to access alumni member lists via official channels, but was denied, according to the association.
Morris has also become an unofficial spokesperson for a group of conservative alumni who believe that VMI has become too liberal and has strayed from the rigorous culture that its students, known as cadets, experienced in previous generations.
The association also issued 10-year suspensions to four alumni whose “VMI Ranks” member portal logins were used, along with Morris’, to scrape the email addresses of more than 6,000 of its 20,000-plus alumni members. Harvesting alumni email addresses violated the terms and conditions of the alumni information portal and warranted the suspension, according to an alumni association memo.
The association’s board voted to suspend the alumni in January, after an investigation by a third-party data analytics company, according to the memo, which was emailed by association president Anthony Moore to alumni of the class years that saw members suspended.
The memo, which was shared with the VMI Board of Visitors on Feb. 1, was obtained by Cardinal News through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
“The [board of directors], made up of 23 elected alumni across many classes and decades, takes the privacy of its members seriously and would only proceed in this direction with abundantly clear and specific violations and a due and fair process independent and separate from any alumni opinions or grievances about the Institute or the [VMI Alumni Association],” Moore said in the seven-page memo. “This matter is about upholding the basic standards at the core of what it means to be associated with VMI.”
The suspension doesn’t bar the men from the campus of the state-run military college in Lexington, but it bans them from official alumni events and activities, including meetings and on-post events such as reunion weekends.
The memo outlines events starting in October 2022, when the VMI Alumni Association says a VMI graduate referred to as “Alumnus 1” asked for a list of email addresses for the entire membership of the VMI Alumni Agencies, the umbrella over several VMI alumni organizations.
The date of Alumnus 1’s request matches that of a request made by Morris for the same information, according to a 2023 petition filed in Rockbridge County Circuit Court. Alumnus 1’s activities match Morris’ actions through the remainder of the timeline.
His request was denied, with the alumni association noting that member email addresses are not made public. About a month later, data records for VMI Ranks showed that Alumnus 1’s login and the logins of seven other alumni were used to “access and scrape or harvest” personal contact information for 6,080 alumni, including email addresses.
The memo says Alumnus 1 then used those addresses to send an email on Jan. 6, 2023, asking for donations to the Cadet Foundation, which funds The Cadet newspaper.
Following the January 2023 solicitation email, the association hired a third-party data analytics company to review the VMI Ranks activity. It confirmed that a scraping tool had been used to quickly collect alumni records, and it found that all eight logins used to scrape the records had been used by someone at the same internet protocol address as Alumnus 1.
The alumni association board of directors decided to suspend the members in September 2023. All eight alumni were given the opportunity to appeal their suspensions, according to the memo, but after some correspondence between the association and unnamed legal counsel claiming to represent the entire group, none of the alumni appeared for a Jan. 20 appeal hearing.
Three of the eight men did offer apologies or other information about their involvement, and the association agreed to lift their 10-year suspensions.
The alumni association would not disclose the name of the firm that conducted the investigation or the names of any of the suspended alumni. In a statement emailed Feb. 15, the association said: “The alumni letters speak for themselves as internal communications addressing a most unfortunate situation with a small number of our members. We are eager to move forward with our mission to inform, engage and inspire support for VMI.”
In the memo outlining the order of events, Moore also noted, “As recently as Jan. 20, 2024, this private contact information appears to have been used by The Cadet Foundation, and the [alumni association] has received several communications expressing concern.”
When Morris was contacted Wednesday night at his email address for his consulting firm, he sent a response saying that “All emails from your address are blocked from delivery to any email address associated with The Cadet Foundation or The Cadet Newspaper.”
“This action is due to your repeated violations of requests not to contact us based on issues with the objectivity and inaccuracy of your reporting,” the response continued, though neither Morris nor anyone else involved with The Cadet has contacted Cardinal News about articles published about the student newspaper.
Morris did not return a phone call the same evening.
A separate email to The Cadet staff asking whether Morris would be retained as alumni mentor to the publication received a response with a similarly worded message.
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In April 2023, four alumni from the classes of 1961 and 1974 filed a petition in Rockbridge County Circuit Court claiming that the VMI Alumni Association had wrongly denied them access to alumni member rolls.
Morris was not directly involved in that case. But the petition cited two previous incidents where the alumni association had denied alumni requests to access member lists, including Morris’ request from October 2022 that later became the catalyst for the email harvesting investigation.
In its response to the court petition, the association said that the alumni hadn’t provided a legitimate reason for requesting the email addresses, and that email addresses aren’t included in the contact information provided to other alumni asking to view the member list.
Included in the alumni association’s response was a January 2023 letter from five members of the class of 1974, including one of the petitioners, asking their classmates to contribute to the Cadet Foundation instead of to the alumni association. It started by noting that 1974 graduates would soon receive a letter from the alumni association requesting donations in celebration of their 50th reunion. Such fundraising efforts for VMI alumni reaching milestone years usually generate millions of dollars.
The letter railed against VMI’s actions following an external investigation of claims of widespread racism at the military school in 2020, and against the reforms VMI implemented in response. The letter accused the VMI Alumni Agencies of losing touch with their membership and stated: “VMI ’74 will serve as the catalyst for other VMI classes to switch their contributions from the VMI AA to The Cadet Foundation, and use ‘the power of the purse’ to defeat the corrosive and divisive CRT/DEI indoctrination currently imposed upon the faculty and Cadet Corps,” referring to critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The alumni association noted that one of the VMI alumni logins used in the email “harvesting effort” was for one of the petitioners who had signed the solicitation letter.
The response also referenced a letter from VMI Alumni Agencies’ legal counsel to Morris dated Jan. 17, 2023, that accused him of obtaining more than 4,800 alumni email addresses since 2021 by improperly accessing the alumni database.
The letter said that several alumni association members had contacted the VMI Alumni Agencies about receiving emails from the Cadet Foundation “within the last week” and had “expressed the mistaken belief that TCF’s [The Cadet Foundation’s] solicitations came from, or were on behalf of, the Alumni Agencies. In fact, just this morning, the Alumni Agencies received a letter enclosing a check made out to TCF and attaching TCF’s recent email from a widow of a 1966 alum who mistakenly believed TCF is part of the alumni agencies. The Alumni Agencies have confirmed that this individual’s information is among the Records viewed using your credentials.”
It’s unclear how much money Morris or his allies may have raised. An online fundraiser for the class of 1974 set up by the Cadet Foundation on Jan. 2, 2023, has collected donations totaling just $300, though other contributions may have been made via mail or other methods.
The alumni petition case concluded in a May 2023 hearing where a judge denied the petitioners’ request that the alumni association provide the member lists and pay their legal fees. The petitioners filed a notice of appeal the next month, but there’s been no movement in the case since then.
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Morris relaunched the student newspaper of VMI, The Cadet, in summer 2021 after a five-year hiatus for the publication.
In the Cadet Foundation’s state corporation registration, Morris is listed as its president and director, while the secretary is listed as Debora Hansen, who works for Morris’ Yorktown-based government consulting firm, the Center for Applied Innovation. The foundation later added two student cadets who worked on the newspaper, and are now alumni, to the list of officers.
That initial SCC filing states that the foundation’s purpose is to produce The Cadet newspaper “and related programs” to financially support “the progress of cadets, alumni and related activities.” It also specified that the foundation would “coordinate the missions of The Cadet newspaper, including coordination with The Virginia Military Institute, The VMI Corporation, the VMI agencies and other non-VMI organizations and activities.”
The newspaper and its supporting foundation were set up just a few months after Morris sued Virginia’s higher education council, alleging it had violated state procurement policy in selecting an independent firm to audit accusations of racism and sexism at VMI. Morris’ company had sought the audit contract.
That case was dismissed in Rockbridge County Circuit Court in May 2021.
Morris’ firm filed another civil suit in spring 2022, this time against VMI itself. The suit claimed that the school had violated procurement policy when it considered companies to provide diversity training on campus. Morris’ consulting firm had applied for the contract but did not make it to the final consideration round. Although the case is still pending and is likely to be dismissed, a judge in Rockbridge County Circuit Court last fall ordered VMI to pay a portion of the legal costs incurred by the Center for Applied Innovation because the school had withheld information about a smaller contract it had executed during the case.
Since its launch, the newspaper has battled with VMI over both its content and its very existence. Unlike previous iterations of The Cadet, the revived newspaper operates without a faculty advisor and without a permit — essentially, VMI’s authorization for cadets to participate.
Articles published in the Cadet, which frequently reference the publication’s independence, have often been met with resistance from VMI.
The newspaper faced blowback from VMI in spring 2022 after publishing an article about the school’s mental health center that the administration said contained errors. An op-ed responding to the piece by Brig. Gen. Dallas Clark, the school’s deputy superintendent, which included a statement that Morris “continues to use the paper for personal attacks on the Institute and to infuse partisan politics into an institution that is apolitical,” was never published by The Cadet.
In the final days of December 2021, Morris and Hansen made a series of donations to incoming Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s inauguration committee totaling $1,800, according to donation records on the Virginia Public Access Project website. On his first day in office in January 2022, the governor, who signs off on appointments to the boards of visitors at state-run colleges, wore a version of his signature red fleece vest bearing the logo of The Cadet newspaper.
Before The Cadet had even published its issue covering the inauguration, VMI spokesperson Bill Wyatt warned Morris and Hansen not to use VMI logos on Cadet Foundation or newspaper material, according to a document released via FOIA and reviewed on VMI’s public FOIA request portal. A few weeks later, the VMI chief of staff’s office released a statement about The Cadet newspaper, saying that while it supported cadets’ rights to exercise free speech, it wished to clarify that “a single alumnus was the driving force” behind the new Cadet newspaper, and that the publication was not in any way affiliated with the school.
In May 2023, The Cadet won the Virginia Press Association Award for Journalistic Integrity and Community Service, for a package of content from the prior year focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, at the state military college. The Cadet was the first student newspaper to receive the award in the press association’s 75-year history. But the entry, lauded by the unnamed contest judge for providing a forum for discussion of diversity issues at VMI, was overwhelmingly critical of VMI and mostly consisted of content that was not credited by name to student staff writers. The newspaper also failed to disclose that Morris is its chief advisor in articles about his legal matters.
An investigation by the Virginia Press Association found it had upheld its own rules when it gave the award to The Cadet, but discussion continued among members of the VMI Board of Visitors. Accusations by board member Teddy Gottwald that VMI spokesperson Bill Wyatt had fed negative information about The Cadet to the media after the VPA award resulted in an internal investigation. No results have been released.
As a student, Morris briefly served as managing editor of The Cadet in 1977 before being asked to resign due to “several mistakes,” according to Cadet issues in VMI’s online archives. He has previously said that cadets control all editorial aspects of the newspaper. But Hansen, the foundation secretary, has submitted 11 FOIA requests to VMI on behalf of the Cadet Newspaper, according to a Cardinal News analysis of requests submitted over the last two years.
Over the past 10 months, Cardinal News has attempted to contact the editorial staff of The Cadet by email six times. No one identifying themselves as a student has ever responded, and recent emails have been rejected with similar language to the ones sent by Morris.
Two phone numbers have been listed on The Cadet website since it was established; one is a number used to speak with Morris, and the other is listed online as a phone number for his company.
The Cadet Foundation showed revenue of nearly $41,000 in 2022, according to its most recent tax filing. The same year, it spent about $14,500 to produce the newspaper. It spent another $18,000 on other expenses that were not detailed in the filing.
Morris has come to serve as a spokesman for conservative alumni who fear that the post-2020 reforms at VMI intended to promote equity, including the scrubbing of much of its Confederate history and reforming its rigorous cadet training programs, dilute the reputation of their alma mater.
The Cadet Foundation has received contributions totaling more than $12,000 from the Spirit of VMI, a conservative political action committee. Both organizations were established in 2021. The Cadet newspaper regularly runs advertisements for the PAC, including several that have been critical of DEI efforts at the school.
And though Morris has said he doesn’t have an opinion on DEI, much of the anti-diversity content in the newspaper seems to reflect the views of two conservative websites housed on the same server as Morris’ consulting firm: Protect Honor and the now-defunct Above All — Truth, which can be accessed via the Wayback Machine.
A 2022 blog post by conservative blog Bacon’s Rebellion referred to Morris as “an alumni activist” who led a group of VMI alumni in an unsuccessful attempt to install more conservative members on the alumni association’s board of directors that spring.