Graduates of the Virginia Military Institute and other colleges are organizing and challenging the administrations and suppliant boards of America’s leading universities.
F urious at their alma maters’ embrace of DEI, suppression of free speech, hot-housing antisemitic bigotry, and so much more, college alumni are increasingly organizing and publicly challenging the administrations and suppliant boards of America’s leading universities. An excellent overview of this graduates-push-back effort can be found in John Murawski’s recent RealClearInvestigations report. Much of it focuses on the affiliates of the expanding Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA), the umbrella group consisting of 27 independent organizations battling riots, gag rules, and the suppression of academic freedom that have become integral to their woke academies.
As the name says, sometimes they do indeed form alliances. Last week, a trio of Virginia-based AFSA members — Virginia Military Institute’s The Cadet Foundation, University of Virginia’s The Jefferson Council (TJR), and Washington and Lee University’s The Generals Redoubt (TGR) — announced in a joint statement they are “sounding the alarm on disturbing efforts by members of the Virginia House and Senate to pressure” VMI’s Board of Visitors “into granting Superintendent Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins a new four-year contract, despite serious allegations of impropriety.” The AFSA affiliates are demanding “an independent investigation into the unethical and potentially unlawful actions of those involved.”
What gives is this: The alumni alliance contends that state lawmakers are strong-arming VMI’s board to rehire its controversial superintendent “through explicit threats to withhold funding from the Institute.” Congressman Ben Cline (R., Va.-6 — where VMI is located) spotlighted the alleged coercion via a letter he sent on February 18 to the clerks of the Virginia house and senate, and subsequently made public. In it, Cline recounted a conversation in which a VMI board member told him that state senator Jennifer Carroll-Foy had warned that same VMI trustee: “I am just trying to help VMI. Cedric is African American. The leadership of the General Assembly is African American. Your board appointments and budget amendments are in peril. You can fix this by giving Cedric a four-year contract extension.”
Cline slammed Carroll Foy’s “race related comments” for being “wholly unbecoming of a member of the General Assembly and completely inconsistent with the values of our nation.” He said they “make plain the leadership of the General Assembly is attempting to exert undue influence on the decisions of the board in exchange for funding priorities of VMI.”
Carroll Foy offered a furious response on X. She charged Cline with “fanning the flames of racism. The Waynesboro-based Augusta Free Press defended her and attacked Cline for “playing DEI politics.”
Despite her sound and fury, the state senator, who is African American and a VMI alumna, has not denied making the intimidating statements as alleged by Cline.
Complementing this controversy is another higher-ed fracas roiling Commonwealth politics. In January, Virginia’s Democrat-controlled senate voted to deny Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointments to the VMI board. (The senate also rejected the governor’s appointment of Kenneth Marcus to George Mason University’s board.)
What’s any of this got to do with free speech? Plenty. Per the statement by the alumni alliance:
The concerns surrounding Maj. Gen. Wins’ leadership are not new. Under his tenure, The Cadet, VMI’s award-winning independent student newspaper, has faced repeated attempts at censorship, as documented by warning letters or letters of concern from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), The Student Press Law Center (SPLC), and most recently the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Despite these concerns, warnings and public outcry, VMI’s administration continued to take retaliatory action against cadets culminating in an egregious memorandum issued by VMI’s Chief of Staff designed to isolate cadets from external supporters.
There’s more. The trio of alumni groups also charge that VMI’s administrators may be defying President Trump’s executive order abolishing DEI in the military by “claiming they have the authority to force Cadets to attend ‘military duty’ that includes NCAA Sporting Events, DEI training and more under Title 10 U.S.C. – Armed Forces.” Warning that “VMI is at a crossroads,” the leadership of The Cadet Foundation, TJC, and TGR promise to “stand resolutely in defense of free expression, institutional independence, and the cadets who have been subjected to an environment of fear and retaliation.”
So much for the merry salad days when college alumni were supposed to stay in the lane of writing checks, singing boolah boolah, tailgating, and attending homecoming football games. But when the values and the very identity of an institution that means so much to you are being threatened, it’s time for its graduates to act.