A judge has dismissed a federal lawsuit by a group of Virginia Military Institute alumni who claimed that the school’s alumni association violated their civil rights.
Judge Norman Moon on Monday ordered the case dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought back to court. Moon’s opinion accompanying the order said that he chose not to address two of the four counts that made claims under state law, though the federal court has supplemental jurisdiction over those claims.
The federal suit, which was filed in June 2024 by more than two dozen alumni, claimed that the state-run military college in Lexington and the VMI Alumni Association are so intertwined that VMI essentially controls the association.
The alumni said the association violated their First and 14th Amendment rights when it restructured VMI’s alumni fundraising organizations in 2019 under an umbrella organization, the VMI Alumni Agencies, without alumni approval. The suit also claimed that the suspension of seven alumni from the association was retaliation against their efforts to reform leadership of the association through voting.
The Alumni Agencies collectively raise funds to support VMI. The alumni association, in its motion to dismiss the case, contended that because it is a private entity separate from VMI, the alumni had no grounds for civil rights claims.
Moon wrote that the complaint failed to present facts to “plausibly establish” that VMIAA was under the control of the institute.
Even though VMI administrators might have had influence in recommending directors for the alumni association’s governing board, “influence, by itself, does not raise an interference of state control,” Moon wrote. He noted that the plaintiffs’ examples of such influence did not include the board of directors of the alumni association, the named defendant in the case.
In response to the plaintiffs’ claims that the CEO of the alumni association was controlled by VMI, Moon wrote that the activities cited in the suit “seem entirely consistent with what one would ordinarily expect of a leader of a private entity dedicated to supporting a public institution of higher education.” He continued, “Indeed, it would be strange for the chief executive of an alumni organization to expressly work in opposition to a college’s strategic goals or to not be a point of contact for college leadership.”
This lawsuit followed a petition in circuit court in Rockbridge County in 2023 that claimed the alumni association had blocked several alumni from obtaining contact information for institute graduates ahead of an association meeting. A judge dismissed the petition, saying the association was within its rights to withhold member contact information because it’s a private organization. Three of the four plaintiffs in that petition were among the group that filed the federal suit.
