Update on the institution next door

States' rights?

On March 5th, five Republican members of Virginia's congressional delegation sent a letter to Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth asking the federal government to intervene in Virginia's oversight of the Virginia Military Institute. Reps. Ben Cline, Rob Wittman, Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, and John McGuire signed it.

The letter warns that two bills moving through Virginia's General Assembly represent dangerous "state over-reach." It maintains the bills could undermine a federally recognized officer-development system and weaken national defense.

The signatories, of course, are from the party that has built its brand since the civil rights era on the idea of states' rights—the principle that the federal government should keep its hands off state institutions. They have apparently decided to make an exception here.

Why? (The answer will shock exactly no one.)

What the letter says

As with the flags, they are relying on the literal aspects of law. Their legal hook is VMI's status as one of six Senior Military Colleges recognized under Title 10 of the U.S. Code. They argue that VMI's participation in ROTC programs under federal authority and the cadets commission at high rates, any state restructuring of VMI's governance should involve a national say. If Virginia can do this to VMI, they warn, any state could do it to any of the other five Senior Military Colleges. (Not that there have yet been any questions or noise about Virginia Tech or the others*.)

The letter cites two outside advocacy documents to support its argument. The first is a resolution from the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (nothing surprising). The second and shadier is an open letter from a group called STARRS (Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services). Including the terrible acronym, the group's name itself tells us how this coalition has framed their opposition. Holding institutions accountable for documented systemic racism is, in their telling, the radicalism. The racism itself, apparently, is just heritage. (Stop me if you've heard this one before.)

What's instructive is what it leaves out.

The letter neglects to mention the 2021 state investigation that found VMI maintained, what it carefully termed, "an outdated, idealized reverence for the Civil War and the Confederacy."

It also doesn't mention the decades during which VMI sent first-year cadets to reenact the Battle of New Market—not as a cautionary tale about what happens when educated men choose treason, but as a heroic tradition to be honored. Their American Thermopylae.

What it also does not mention is Cedric Wins. (More on that later.)

The two bills in question—one restructuring VMI's Board of Visitors and one establishing a task force to examine whether the reforms demanded by a 2021 state investigation have actually been implemented—were both substantially watered down before passage.

We covered this legislation in February, including how VMI's superintendent eventually endorsed the amended task force bill once the language threatening state funding was stripped out. What survived is modest.

What the congressional letter is trying to kill is modesty itself.

The question the letter is designed to prevent

In 2020, retired Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins became VMI's first Black superintendent, appointed in the aftermath of that damning state investigation. Under his tenure, VMI implemented 34 of 38 reform recommendations. The Confederate reenactment at New Market ended. VMI made documentable and documented progress.

In 2025, VMI's Board of Visitors chose not to renew Wins' contract.

The first Black superintendent in the institution's history—the man tasked with addressing a documented culture of Confederate reverence and racial hostility—made substantial, measurable progress on the reforms the state demanded. And the board fired him for that.

That board was not a neutral body. Throughout Wins' tenure, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin was making appointments to it. The Governor stacked the board that decided Wins' reforms had gone far enough. The same Governor whose political coalition had spent years characterizing those reforms as ideological overreach. This outcome was not an accident. It was premeditated.

And now, the same political network that engineered Wins' exit asks Trump and Hegseth to shield VMI from the task force that would examine whether his work will remain or be publicly reversed to appease the basest base.

As they do, they have dressed this up in the language of national security and federal supremacy. But let's see it for what it is: a Lost Cause" protection racket for an institution that has never fully reckoned with what it spent generations teaching.

The hand signing off on the protection

Now the true picture emerges. Pete Hegseth, who received the congressional letter asking for VMI's protection, wrote a memo that blacklisted the College of William & Mary from the Senior Service College Fellows program because W&M had failed to "sharpen our leaders' warfighting capabilities" and had "undermined the very values they are sworn to defend."

Hegseth's preferred replacements for W&M include Liberty University. Jeebus. Yes that one.

Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell, espouses a particular strain of Christian nationalist education that has never been shy about its sympathies. The man deciding which institutions are worthy of federal military partnership has a worldview, and it is not subtle.

VMI—with its documented Lost Cause culture, its fired Black superintendent, its cadets who were taught about Confederate heroes while enslaved people who built and sustained the institution were erased from the record—gets a letter of protection from five Republican members of Congress and the implicit backing of the Department of War. W&M gets blacklisted. This is not a coincidence. This is a policy. From the Confederacy to the Pentagon indeed.

Federalism when it suits them

Sitting members of Congress did not write to anyone in 1968, when VMI was the last public college in Virginia to desegregate—four years after the Civil Rights Act. Even then, they only did so because the federal government threatened their funding

The current crop didn't write when the 2021 investigation found persistent barriers, inadequately addressed sexual assault reports, and a culture that made Black cadets and women feel like outsiders in their own state institution. They did not write when the Board of Visitors decided that Cedric Wins had done enough reforming and it was time for him to go.

They wrote when Virginia proposed asking, through a task force, whether the reforms had actually stuck.

And there it is.

The invocation of federal supremacy and national security is not a principled argument about the constitutional limits of state authority. It is a tool, deployed selectively, to protect a specific institutional culture from a specific kind of scrutiny. When VMI resisted desegregation, federal intervention was the problem. When Virginia asks whether VMI has moved past celebrating the Confederacy, federal intervention is suddenly the solution.

It's the racism.

The task force created by HB 1377 will report its findings by November 2026. It will examine whether VMI has actively worked to distance itself from Lost Cause mythology and whether it has the institutional capacity to stop celebrating the Confederacy. These are not radical questions 160 years after the war. They are the minimum a state owes its taxpayers when it spends $30 million a year on an institution with this history.

Cedric Wins answered those questions quietly and professionally. The board fired him for doing it, and they answered them too.

Non in cautus futuri.

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*Norwich University (VT), University of North Georgia, Texas A&M University, and The Citadel.