The U.S. military, which burned Virginia Military Institute in 1864, now wants to save it.
At least that’s what the Pentagon spokesman said this week, when he posted on social media that “the stability of this proven leadership pipeline is a matter of direct national security interest” and the Department of Defense (which President Donald Trump calls the Department of War) “reserves the right to take extraordinary measures to protect the integrity of VMI.”
The Pentagon did not elaborate on what those “extraordinary measures” might be, and there is no known legal avenue for the federal government to take control of a state university, but this is also a presidential administration that has tended to take action, whether there is legal authority or not. (See the ongoing legal battles over whether Trump had authority to tear down the East Wing of the White House, for starters.)
Curiously, the Pentagon social media post referenced the most provocative of the VMI bills before the General Assembly — but the one that is least likely to pass. It’s hard to tell if this was an oversight or simply something performative.
The bill that the Pentagon referenced was HB 1374 by Del. Michael Feggans, D-Virginia Beach, which would dissolve VMI’s governing board and put the school under the control of Virginia State University, a historically Black college near Petersburg. I may be guilty of misreading the moment, but I’ve never taken Feggans’ bill seriously; I read it more as a symbolic warning shot to VMI but not a bill that was ever likely to make it to the governor’s desk. For one thing, the bill seems indirectly a rebuke of our current governor; it seems to imply that Abigail Spanberger can’t be trusted to name what the General Assembly would consider good people to the VMI board. This bill is currently still in a subcommittee, where action has been delayed, which sometimes means nothing but sometimes means it’s being intentionally ignored.
The more serious (and potentially threatening) VMI bill has been HB 1377, by Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County, which, as originally introduced, would have set up a task force to study, among other things, “whether VMI should continue to be a state-sponsored institution of higher education.”
That bill passed out of committee on a party-line vote (Democrats in favor, Republicans against) and has been pending on the House floor since Monday. It was “passed by for the day” twice, a delaying tactic that was apparently related to some behind-the-scenes lobbying by VMI interests. On Wednesday, Helmer offered an amended version that took out the part about reevaluating whether VMI should even be a state-supported school. In military terms, we might call this a strategic retreat.
This is not the first time the notion of pulling state funding from VMI has come up. Helmer’s bill originally referenced a 1928 state study that concluded VMI was duplicative of other state schools and recommended that the Lexington school either be leased to alumni or closed altogether. Nothing ever came of that proposal, but it should be noted that the year 1928 was not exactly a year when liberal “wokeness” was running amok in the land, so if a study nearly a century ago came to the conclusion that the state didn’t need VMI, it’s not out of the question that a study today could do the same. Helmer’s original bill specifically directed the task force to look at that 1928 study; the new version makes no mention of it. Presumably, the task force could still do so if it wanted to, but the prospective panel is no longer required to address that 98-year-old study. The bill now seems innocuous enough that VMI has endorsed the measure: “We are confident that an impartial task force will find that VMI is a Virginia treasure that produces citizen-soldiers ready to serve selflessly as military officers or civilian leaders. While no institution is perfect, VMI is open to improvement in our constant pursuit of excellence. Should the bill be signed into law, we look forward to working with the task force and sharing the VMI experience with them,” said Superintendent David Furness ’87 in a statement.
For those who don’t know Helmer, we should note that he’s not exactly a “peace, love and understanding” pacifist. He’s a West Point grad who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and is now a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. He is the Democrats’ “Mr. Military.” He also has strong views about how much of VMI’s culture still seems to look on the Confederacy with more fondness than he believes it should.
Here’s what Helmer said in the General Assembly recently: “We know today students at VMI attend class in Maury Hall and Scott Shipp Hall, celebrating two Confederate officers. They attend class in Mallory Hall, celebrating a Confederate secretary of the Navy. Every graduate today has emblazoned on their rings … the date of the Battle of [New Market] in which cadets marched out in a spectacular act of treason and fired on United States troops in defense of slavery.”
These are shocking words, I’m sure, to those who were taught to honor those VMI cadets of 1864 and not regard them as traitors. Helmer wants VMI divorced from that legacy. Even with the questions about VMI’s state-sponsored status removed from the bill, the measure would still direct the task force to determine whether the school “has actively made efforts to distance itself from the lost-cause narrative or other celebrations or promotions of the Confederacy in the American Civil War” and “possesses the capacity as an institution to end celebration of the Confederacy.”
The main danger to VMI appears to have passed but that task force, if it’s created, could still come back with some stinging report.
We often hear chatter about how “VMI should just go private,” but that’s not how this works. VMI is owned by the state, through its gubernatorially appointed board. The state can fund the school or not, but, legally speaking, VMI is a creature of the state; it’s not some independent entity that can secede from state control. If the state were to sell the Lexington property at market value, it’s difficult to comprehend the price of all the historic buildings.
That 1928 report recommended that the state lease the property to alumni for $1 a year if the alumni could afford to operate the school. That seems a more practical proposition — although in an era where the pool of traditional college-age students is shrinking, all around we see private colleges in some degree of distress. VMI does have a private endowment of $831.7 million, which puts it well ahead of many schools. (Hollins University is somewhere north of $300 million, Washington & Lee University about $1 billion.) However, state funding for VMI in the current fiscal year is about $35 million. That’s how much alumni would need to come up with every year just to keep VMI whole, and there are likely lots of hidden costs that would drive that figure higher. The only honest answer is we really don’t know what it would cost for VMI “to go private,” even if the state allowed it.
There are at least two ways to view the Pentagon’s social media post:
The first is: This is simply a performative drama from the Trump administration.
The second is: This is an actual threat.
I’d offer up a third possible interpretation: This is an opportunity, both for those who despise VMI and for those who worship it.
One of the threshold questions for Virginia is whether the state should be operating a military school.
If the answer is yes (it’s a unique form of education, and VMI has a long and distinguished record of producing graduates), then that sends us down one road of questions, many of which are going to be difficult to resolve. How much of VMI’s culture needs to change? How capable is VMI (and its alumni base) of making those changes? It’s easy to change the name of buildings, but how easy is it for VMI to change the ethos around New Market? How much of VMI’s culture is going to be subject to who gets elected governor every four years? That doesn’t seem conducive to much stability.
If the answer is no, that Virginia at this point in the 21st century has no need of a military school founded back when Martin Van Buren was president, then the questions become simpler: Should the state shut it down? Should the state lease it to alumni if they think they can make a go of it? That’s where the Pentagon might have inadvertently offered both sides a way out. If VMI really is “a matter of direct national security interest” because it produces so many military officers, then it seems natural to ask: Why is a single state running the school then? Why is VMI not a national enterprise the way the traditional military academies are? Should Virginia strike a deal to sell VMI to the federal government?
Would that relieve the conscience of Virginians who don’t believe that their tax dollars should be spent on Confederate idolatry? And would that relieve the anxieties of those in the VMI orbit who don’t want anyone telling them how VMI should be run? It might — unless, of course, some future president starts to ask why the federal government is running a school that celebrates “a spectacular act of treason,” so a federal takeover could simply be a short-term solution that ignores a longer-term problem.
For now, the Trump administration has fired off a single tweet, which might just be for show or might be deadly serious. It would be a great irony of history if the Fort Sumter of our time turned out to be VMI. Or maybe, as they say about old soldiers, this will all just fade away if both sides let it.
Want more political news and analysis? We have more each week in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Fridays.