Proposed legislation reopens questions into the validity of the state’s investigation into VMI student culture.

by Jackson Doane

It’s commonly said that good fences make good neighbors. Between Washington and Lee (W&L) and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), nothing separates us but a short walk, yet we have long been good neighbors. So when news broke in January that two bills were introduced in the General Assembly that would limit VMl’s ability to self­govern, I felt it only right to look into why our neighbors were suddenly under scrutiny.

House Bill 1374 and House Bill 1377 were recently introduced, and since then, the complicated and, at times, hostile relationship between the school and the state government – which dates back at least five and a half years – has resurfaced with renewed intensity.

In October 2020, a front-page article in the Washington Post detailed allegations of racially discriminatory incidents at VMI over the preceding years. The story drew national attention, especially in the wake of a summer and fall of race-based political protests, and thrust VMI into the national spotlight.

The article caught the attention of the then-governor at the time, Ralph Northam, who is also a VMI alumnus. He co-signed a letter with the lieutenant governor and attorney general to VMl’s Board of Visitors, the school’s governing body, calling for a “state-funded, independent third-party review” of the student body’s culture, particularly regarding students of nonwhite ethnicities.

Northam’s letter described what he believed to be a “clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism at the Virginia Military Institute.” That letter, combined with national media attention and pressure from state officials, led the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) to commission an investigation by the third-party law firm Barnes & Thornburg, which released a report published in June 2021. The 2021 report
The SCHEV investigation at VMI was conducted from January 7, 2021, to June 1, 2021, spanning a period of 145 days. According to SCHEV, it was done with the purpose of investigating allegations of racism and sexism at VMI.

The investigation included a 117-question voluntary survey completed by 2,496 individuals, including 540 cadets, 326 faculty and administrators and 1,630 alumni. The questions on the voluntary survey are not public knowledge. The team also conducted 385 interviews, hosted six focus groups and reviewed thousands of institutional records. The Barnes & Thornburg team that conducted the investigation was composed of 39 people who spent 5,000 hours on the process according to the investigation report.

From their findings, the investigation team concluded, among many things, the following: “VMI has no explicitly racist or sexist policies that it enforces.” It also stated that “this report does not recommend that any of VMl’s core policies, practices and traditions, including the Honor Code and Rat Line, be abolished.”

“The investigation did not identify conclusive violations of Title VI or Title IX”, according to the team’s report. “The investigation did not reveal any immediate threats of racial violence.” (Title VI and Title IX refer to race-based and sex-based anti-discrimination laws.)

The report does allege “an overall racist and sexist culture” at VMI. The basis for this synthesis comes from the team’s interpretation of personal narratives, survey data and statistical disparities.

When discussing VMI in the context of recent news, it’s important to understand that this 2021 investigation and its conclusions are the basis upon which the General Assembly is drawing its current actions.

The report’s methodology

One issue with this methodology is how interviews were conducted during this investigation. The interviewees were not randomly selected. During the investigation, 117 actively enrolled cadets were interviewed, roughly 13% of the student body- a minority. Cadets who were interviewed either volunteered to be interviewed or were directly invited by the team.

In survey methodology, randomized sampling is the gold standard for producing representative results; when participation is voluntary or invitation-based, the risk of self-selection bias increases, as individuals with especially strong or negative experiences are disproportionately more likely to respond to interview opportunities.

The team used the same format for interviewing alumni. Despite this, the investigation report singles out the alumni interviews, of which there were 161, as being particularly non-representative, saying “the possibility exists that the alumni interviewed (particularly those who reached out to the team directly) felt, on balance, more strongly about the issues addressed in the investigation than the general alumni population.”

It is methodologically inconsistent for the investigation team to hypothesize that the alumni interview findings were skewed by self-selection bias when cadet interviews were sourced in the same fashion. If alumni interviews are subject to potential self­-selection bias, the same methodological caution would logically apply to cadet interviews conducted through voluntary or invitation-based outreach.

The interviews form a crucial component of the foundation for the investigation team’s conclusions about VMl’s culture. They were not randomly selected and therefore cannot, on their own, be used to infer population-wide conclusions, yet the team gave them significant weight when surmising their conclusions. The voluntary survey suffers from the same selection bias possibilities as the interviews.

In the report, the team plainly states that it “sought information both about what individuals personally experienced and also about what they had heard from others.” These are analytically different categories, but they are collected together under the investigation’s conclusion.

Furthermore, the report explicitly states that it examined both participants’ perceptions of institutional culture and documented incidents. While information on students’ perceptions of their environment can be valuable, it differs from verified findings of policy violations and must be interpreted with the utmost methodological care.

The investigation’s methodology relied heavily on nonprobability survey data, voluntary interviews, and perception-based answers when drawing its conclusions, which can be valuable in evaluating the human culture at an institution, the lack of clarity regarding how qualitative and quantitative findings were weighted raise legitimate questions about the degree to which the report’s cultural diagnosis can be treated as statistically and holistically representative of the institution as a whole.

The report ultimately advances a cultural assessment rather than a finding of formal institutional policy violation – a distinction that matters when its conclusions are being used to create recommendations for policy change at VMI and justify structural legislative intervention.

The report’s recommendations

This report also featured 42 unique recommendations for the VMI administration, on pages 9-16. They range from concerns about accountability to adjusting institutional traditions at the school. Many of the recommendations have to do with clarifying policies and reiterating no-tolerance stances on “hateful language and actions,” but some are much more far-reaching.

Notable suggestions include monitoring the cadets’ social media to help identify racism and sexism (5b), implementing holistic “sensitivity” training (5a), prohibiting alumni groups from accepting money from people whose values are identified as “discriminatory” (4d), specifically promoting female staff members (2a) and creating a fund for recruiting more nonwhite cadets (1 a).

The ambiguity of many recommendations, particularly the absence of day-to-day operational definitions for terms such as “racist,” “sexist” or “discriminatory,” risks inconsistent enforcement and raises due process concerns.

With recommendation 5b, any proposal to monitor cadets’ social media raises legitimate disquiet about scope, definition and the aforementioned due process. Since VMI is a public university, cadets retain First Amendment rights; nonviolent, offensive or controversial speech is protected. Moreover, there is no clear information on what this process would look like. We do not know who would be doing the monitoring, where this information would be stored, what qualifies as prejudiced social media activity or what would happen if a cadet is identified under this monitoring.

There is also a recommendation from the investigative team that VMI should act to create more “stigma” around any action that could be identified as racist, sexist, or prejudiced (5c). To ask the school’s administration themselves to create more social stigma at VMI would be to create more instances of othering, which directly contradicts the goal of unifying the student body, even if well-intended.

The report itself does not recommend abolishing VMl’s core systems. Yet its 42 recommendations have increasingly been treated as a comprehensive mandate by the General Assembly, as though full adoption is the only acceptable evidence of VMI reforming itself. That framing has transformed these suggestions into de facto requirements. If compliance with each recommendation becomes the metric used for determining whether VMI is “willing to change,” then disagreement with any one recommendation can be cast as resistance to equity as a whole. This is neither fair nor productive.

The new legislation

As I mentioned earlier, two bills have been recently introduced in the General Assembly that concern VMI: HB1374 and HB1377.

HB1374 was introduced by Del. Michael Feggans (D-Virginia Beach). The original text he introduced would have dissolved VMl’s Board of Visitors and transferred governance of the school over to Virginia State University’s board. VSU is about160 miles away from Lexington. This bill sparked immense backlash and became the subject of national media attention.
Following this backlash, Feggans visited VMI on February 8. In a Virginia Mercury interview, Feggans cited a productive visit as the reason for deciding to amend his bill. He removed language about stripping VMl’s governance and reintroduced the bill to amend the structure of VMl’s board rather than dissolving it entirely.

The bill that Feggans originally introduced reads as a textbook example of the Overton window strategy, which is when a politician introduces something outlandish, expecting public (and in this case also federal) backlash, and then later introduces “moderate” amended legislation that fully accomplishes their goal while still looking like a compromise. In this case, Feggans’ goal was to weaken alumni voting power within the school’s board of visitors.

According to Cardinal News, Lt. Gen. Dave Furness, the current superintendent of VMI, spoke in support of the revised HB1374 during a House of Delegates Education committee meeting on Feb. 11. Furness said that he was pleased with the amended bill and planned to continue the work of Gen. Cedric Wins, his predecessor, who was VMl’s first Black superintendent, and whose contract was not renewed last year. Wins’ non renewal is a sore subject within the General Assembly.

Some believe that Wins’ hiring in 2021 was a response to immense external pressure on the school caused by the investigation report, especially as Wins championed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives during his tenure. Likewise, in 2025, his contract not being renewed could be seen as a rejection of those policies, especially by a board of visitors dominated by Youngkin appointees.

I believe that the original version of the bill Feggans introduced was never intended to be voted on; it was solely a show of muscle directed at VMI. Virginia Democrats have control of both legislative chambers and the governorship, giving them the power structure to pass legislation with only party-line votes. The original bill and Feggans’ visit was a message to VMI that they no longer had the protection of Governor Youngkin and that if they wished to continue receiving state funding, they would have to accept big changes over the next few years.

Currently, the Virginia code that addresses the structure of VMl’s board carves out sixteen voting seats. Twelve of those are expressly reserved for alumni. Feggans’ amended legislation would limit the number of seats that could be filled by alumni to eight, ending the board’s alumni majority.

The other bill, HB1377, was introduced by Del. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax) and would create another investigation team to review VMl’s progress toward the standards in the 2021 SVHEV report.

It attempts to justify a new investigation by identifying the alleged unchanged culture of racial and sex-based disparity at VMI.

Furthermore, the proposed legislation refers to Stonewall Jackson as a traitor and admonishes the school for continuing to commemorate the 240 VMI alumni and 10 cadets who died in the Civil War while fighting for the Confederacy. It also improperly states, as fact, that Wins’ removal as superintendent was because of his attempts to “end racism, discrimination, and sexual assault and harassment,” at VMI. This claim has not been substantiated in any documented finding.

Using 2020 data, the bill also criticizes VMl’s admissions office for over-admitting legacies, students with at least one alumni parent. For the graduating class of 2024 cohort, 6% of matriculating first-years were legacies.

For comparison, the University of Virginia’s UVA magazine estimates that nearly 15% of first-years in the class of 2027 were legacies.

In 2024, the General Assembly passed legislation prohibiting public Virginia universities from considering legacy status when reviewing applications. Since then, VMl’s percentage of legacy admits has decreased. In the class of 2028, 4% of first-years were legacies, while at UVA, nearly 13% of first-years were legacies. The following year, UVA’s class of 2029 legacy admission rate only decreased by .5 percentage points. It’s unclear why VMI is being individually criticized for legacy admission numbers, especially when UVA’s legacy rate has still maintained a rate of more than one in 10 students.

Based on this justification, the proposed legislation aims to establish a new investigative task force that would audit VMI and determine its responsiveness to the 2021 recommendations. It also calls for the new investigation to determine if VMl’s role in creating military leaders could be filled by another institution and evaluate the school’s academic rigor, racial demographics data, and if they should continue to receive state funds. The language also allows the task force to explore “any other questions or concerns” that may arise, and in the process of doing so, compel VMI to produce any document or data they deem necessary.

For Governor Abigail Span berger and the Virginia Democrats, it is a politically shrewd move to introduce these two bills in tandem. The bill to investigate VMl’s progress on the team’s 42 recommendations, made back in 2021, while Virginia had a Democratic governor, is likely to result in findings critical of VMl’s progress, as the political pressure driving those reforms shifted once Republican Gov. Youngkin took office in early 2022.

The bill to lower alumni representation on the school’s board of visitors then allows Spanberger to more easily appoint political allies who will vote to adopt the recommendations from the new task force, overhauling policy at VMI. Feggans’ bill does allow for board members to serve out their complete terms. Three board members’ terms will expire this summer, leaving four open positions (there is currently a vacant seat) to be filled by Spanberger appointees. Even with these four vacancies, VMI will still have nine alumni on its board, meaning all four vacancies must be filled by non-alumni. By pairing these two bills, Spanberger and her allies will, within the year, have reined in control of VMl’s board.

The Feggans bill, while being politically savvy, does, however, reveal the Democrats’ hand as strategically predetermined. Creating a sweeping change to a codified law, based on dated data, demonstrates that, regardless of the results of the new report – which won’t even be available to the public until over six months after the law that changes the structure of VMl’s BOV will go into effect – the party will be taking control of the board. This will all be done under the guise of eliminating racism and sexism at VMI.

Women, rape culture and VMI

Nonconsensual sexual activity is a serious issue whenever it happens on any campus, and many cases do go unreported. Any discussion of statistics should begin with that reality in mind.

On page 32, the investigative team concluded that “the[ir] investigation did reveal instances of sexual violence and risk of future such instances” at VMI.
Similar concerns have surfaced at peer military institutions, including The Citadel, where past surveys and reporting have documented comparable concerns regarding sexual assaults among female cadets. The most recent data for VMI, which comes from the investigation report, found that 14% of female students who completed their survey reported experiencing nonconsensual contact.

A 2021 Washington Post article by Ian Shapira compares reported incidents of rape between VMI and The Citadel, another military college, in the years 2017-2019. In this time, VMI reported 14 rapes and The Citadel reported seven. The article uses this figure to raise concerns about VMl’s culture.
But data on non-consensual sexual incidents at VMI do not point to a unique problem at the school. Virtually all colleges, and specifically other military academies, see some level of this behavior. Fortunately, over the last few years, according to a 2024 Westat survey of 42,000 students, undergraduate women, by and large, have reported declining rates of experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact.

VMl’s recent data even follows this trend. From 2022-2024, VMI reported four rapes, The Citadel reported nine rapes and Washington and Lee reported 12 rapes. If raw reported totals alone are used as the metric, these figures would suggest a resurgence of a “rape culture” at The Citadel and Washington and Lee, but raw totals alone are insufficient to draw conclusions about institutional culture. Sexual violence is highly individualized, and using a snapshot of volatile rape report numbers as a way to label an institution is not only analytically weak but irresponsible.

Shapira’s article also mentions that multiple female VMI alumni anonymously shared with them experiencing firsthand or hearing from others incidents of sexual violence that were not reported, either for personal reasons or concerns about the social response.

A culture of underreporting/nonreporting is not a VMl-specific occurrence. The Centers for Disease Control’s webpage on Sexual Violence states that “many cases [everywhere] are unreported.” Labeling VMI as uniquely defined by a “rape culture” requires evidence that its rates materially differ from peer institutions – something the currently available comparative data does not establish.

VMI, along with all colleges, should continue to offer comprehensive Title IX education to all students, regardless of sex, and continue to create and advertise open lines of protected communication between Title IX staff and students. When serious but unfortunately widespread issues of sexual assault are being used as justification for extraordinary structural changes at VMI, lawmakers must demonstrate why one institution warrants singular treatment. The current legislative record has not made that case.

Race, statistics and VMI

Although the investigative report did not conclude that VMI operates under formal, institutional or structural racism, one of the statistics it does include on the subject of racial disparities is a bar graph (Figure 8) that shows that since the late 2010s, the six­-year graduation rate for White students is higher than that of Black students. While this could be cause for alarm if truly representative of race graduation rates, I believe that the investigative team overlooked an important finding of their own research: 60% of African American cadets are athletes.

The six-year graduation rate metric is calculated by measuring how many people in a cohort graduate from VMI in the span of six years. It does not take into account why they did not graduate from VMI.

VMI is a Division I school, and in October 2018, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) introduced its digital athlete transfer portal. This portal brought two big changes for DI sports. First, it removed the requirement for athletes to ask permission from their home institution to contact other schools; this put agency entirely on the student, allowing them to openly advertise themselves as available transfer recruits. Secondly, it streamlined the process for athletes looking to be recruited to play at other schools; the portal only takes a few minutes to set up.

Using available data from a 2024 Washington and Lee journalism project on VMI athletics and publicly available athlete transfer data, and then cross-referencing athlete names with their roster profiles on the VMI athletics website, I found that over the past few years, VMI has consistently had numerous Black athletes transfer to play at different schools each year. While some of these players were graduating seniors using their extra year of eligibility elsewhere, many were not.

All NCAA sports use this transfer portal, and while complete sport-wide data is limited, football and basketball illustrate the broader transfer dynamics at play. According to page 3 of the investigatory report, 18% of VMl’s athletes are Black.

At VMI, in any recent given year, there are about 100-120 Black students total, according to Forbes. Since Black students make up only about 7% of the student body, even a small number of transfer departures could cause a distortion of the Black graduation rate at VMI. The report does not appear to adjust for this potential statistical distortion.

The student culture problem

After having reviewed hundreds of pages of the state’s reports, examining public athletic data and having personal conversations with cadets and alumni across perspectives, I have reached a different conclusion about the cultural rift identified by investigators. I believe that the divide described in the report is not one sourced strictly from racial or sex-based bigotry. Rather, the consistently acknowledged tension is between athletes and non-athletes, particularly around athletes’ perceived preferential treatment and uneven adherence to institutional rules.

The SCHEV investigation “found that a significant rift does indeed exist between athlete and non-athlete cadets. Both athletes and non-athletes feel the rift.” It stated that “non-athletes tend to resent athletes because they are given what is perceived as preferential treatment.”

As the fourth-smallest NCAA Division I school in the country, VMI boasts a 25% athlete population. This means that of the average VMI class year of 400 cadets, 100 of them are athletes. When a quarter of the student body operates under a different daily structure and set of incentives, friction between the athletic and non-athletic majority becomes structural.

Compounding this dynamic, VMI is also not a Power Four school. This means that its football team does not play within the four major DI football conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC). Athletic programs that do not play within those conferences face an uphill battle when it comes to retaining athletes and funding.

Convincing elite athletes to come to a military school presents an additional hurdle.

Because of this, in my opinion, being the head football coach of VMI may be the hardest college football job in the country when it comes to recruiting. In an interview with the Associated Press, Dave Rocco, who served as head coach for the 2023-2025 seasons, agrees. He points to things like the “rat line,” a series of physical and mental challenges students are required to complete during their first year at VMI. This unattractive requirement includes athletes and would also include any athlete who transfers from another institution.

VMl’s DI status is a major driver of the problems its student body faces today. Since the introduction of the NCAA transfer portal eight years ago, VMI has seen a significant portion of its athletes turn transient, awaiting a chance to transfer to a more “prestigious” program at another school, rather than four years of bonding and becoming brothers and sisters with their fellow students. According to student interviews, athletes have been given a different student experience: better facilities, better academic resources and opportunities to skip out on grueling workouts and marches.

“Many of them [athletes] have no problem saying they just came here for sports, or to play here for a year or two and then just transferring to a bigger school,” one student in the report said.

Another described resentment building when athletes appear disengaged from the military system, arguing that this resentment can sometimes be interpreted as racial hostility even when the underlying conflict centers on participation and discipline.

According to the report, some athletes said they were not fully briefed – or told at all – what being a student at a military school would require them to do. Former VMI Basketball Player Devin Butler echoed this sentiment in an interview with W&L students: “If you tell a kid everything about VMI and the ins and outs, there’s no way you’re gonna get that kid.”

If coaches are not being entirely forthcoming to recruited athletes about what will be required of them while at VMI, this creates further issues – both for athletes who feel blindsided and for non-athletes who see this as a lack of commitment.

In an environment as intensely bonding and rule-oriented as VMI, conflicts over participation, discipline and commitment to the military system can easily intersect with race and gender. But intersection is not the same as origin.

My diagnosis is not that racism or sexism have never occurred at VMI; individual instances clearly have. Instead, the report’s evidence actually suggests that a significant portion of the cultural rift described in the report stems from structural tensions created by DI athletics at a small military institution, which have been monumentally intensified by the modern transfer portal era.

Conclusion

I do not doubt that incidents of racism and sexism have occurred at VMI. In fact, the investigation report documents several. Nor do I wish to dismiss the personal experiences of cadets who say they have felt discriminated against. But the state’s 2021 investigation, which did not identify any racist or sexist policies, conclusive Title VI or Title IX violations or immediate threats of racial violence, does not support the sweeping, operating claim that VMI operates under a uniquely racist or sexist institutional culture.

The General Assembly’s current legislative response and rhetoric go well beyond what the report’s own findings established.

Moreover, the report itself identifies a significant, widely acknowledged rift between athletes and non-athletes. This structural divide affects roughly a quarter of the cadets. In a small military institution competing in DI athletics, intensified by the modern transfer portal era, the instability surrounding athletic recruitment and retention cannot be ignored when considering the student body culture as a whole.

I believe that this structural dynamic is being misidentified as purely racial or sex-based hostility. Therefore, the legislative solutions, which focus entirely on race and sex, need to be entirely reevaluated.

Governor Spanberger and the delegates who have introduced and supported the House bills should explain why HB1374, which would change VMl’s governance, is being introduced without any concrete supporting evidence, months before the investigation expected as a result of HB1377 has even begun.

If the General Assembly truly wishes to act in the best interests of VMl’s future, it should focus its legislative efforts on documented issues. This may mean re-evaluating VMl’s DI status, examining recruiting transparency by coaches and addressing the athlete/non-athlete divide directly rather than restructuring VMl’s board of visitors as a symbolic corrective against changes taking place at federally-funded military colleges.

It also means allowing current cadets, not external political actors, to speak freely and comprehensively about their experiences without prompting or pre-filtering from an investigation team.

When cadets are given the opportunity to express themselves freely on the matter, such as in a memo released by student leaders, they have overwhelmingly spoken against these legislative changes. Cadets from all backgrounds seem to agree on one thing: nobody is listening to them.
The General Assembly should pause both bills to allow for a nonpartisan investigation with unaffiliated investigators. And they should sponsor the creation of an open platform for cadets – current and past – to share what they believe needs to be done to improve their school.

VMI should not be used as a vehicle for political signaling. It is a historic Virginia institution with a history of producing some of the finest military men and women our country has ever had. It deserves reform based on factual evidence, not politically symbolic restructuring.

I am concerned for the future of our neighboring institution if the General Assembly continues to escalate rather than ground its actions in evidence. The cadets and people of Virginia deserve better.

Jackson Doane is the Opinions Editor of The Ring-tum Phi, an independent student newspaper at the University of Washington & Lee. This article is published with permission from Ring-tum Phi.