Virginia Military Institue is America's oldest (1839) public, state military college, as opposed to the Federal Military Academies. Most people haven't heard of it, or hadn't until the Supreme Court case a few years ago determined that a public university (as opposed to a PRIVATE university) could not have a single sex admission policy. And many that HAVE heard of VMI may have a few misconceptions.
It DOES require all students to wear uniforms all the time and live in a barracks. It DOES require all students to take ROTC classes.
It does NOT require (since about 1989 or so) students to actually accept a commission in the Armed Forces, and is therefore NOT a "military academy" like the Service Academies.
It IS a public university and therefore one acutally has to pay to go there. I'm fond of telling my West Point friends (some of my best friends went to WP :-) ) when they tell me their education was free, that you get what you pay for. (There's also that thing they say about taking the $100,000 education and something about one nickle at a time, but we'll leave that part out of this family friendly site
)As Steve indicated, particulary during the late 60's when I went through until the mid 70's, there were MANY things about the VMI ratline that made it a much more difficult school to attend. His references to "The Lords of Discipline, Pat Conroy's incredible loosley fictional book about his time at "Carolina Military Institute (read: The Citadel) are good. I graduated almost 35 years ago, and reading that book STILL makes me break out in a sweat.
I know two people personally who were "rats" (that's freshmen) at VMI (one who attended a year before I arrived, and one actually in my class) that were accepted into WP the following year, eventually graduating from there. BOTH of them stated that plebe year at WP, while longer, was cake compared to the ratline at VMI.
As Steve indicate, there were things commonly done during our time a VMI that had LONG since disappeared from the Academies. (As they have now from VMI). For the most part, that's probably for the best. If someone were to try to use the same practices used to "recognize" freshmen at the end of the year that were part of "Bloody Sunday", they'd not only be expelled, they'd go to jail. That is no exaggeration.
The two schools have different missions. The service academies are designed to produce career military officers. VMI uses the military environment as a teaching method, with a secondary goal of producing "citizen soldiers", a VERY 19th century concept.
But for ALL that, not only would I NEVER have considered going anywhere else, I am totally convinced that for me, the entire process was EXACTLY what I needed to provide me with the self discipline and inner strength to get where I am today.
And for those who have the temperment to take "the road less travelled" you will NOT find a place which comes CLOSE to teaching not only the academic requirements needed for life, but the intangibles that our society keeps begging for, like moral courage and integrity.
But I will never claim to be unbiased about my alma mater, and no VMI grad will either.
(PS, every West Point and Annapolis graduate who wore 5 stars during and after WW II, to include Eisenhower, MacArthur, Bradley, Nimitz, etc , ALL worked for a VMI grad, General of the Army George C. Marshall, who was not only the equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but went on to become the Secretary of State, and author of the Marshall Plan, for which he won a Nobel PEACE Prize.)
Tom Hathaway
VMI Class of 1972
