Alumni and Friends of VMI:
Cyber Corps Numbers: 575
VMI Alumni Association Meeting: I recently
received the minutes from the April 10 meeting of the Board of
Directors of the VMI Alumni Association. Over the next few weeks
I will pass along portions of the minutes. For the sake of
brevity I will extract portions of the minutes, but will attempt
to do so in such as way as not to change the context of what
transpired during the meeting. Please note that certain words are
in bold. These are not my editorial preferences, but rather as
the words appeared in the minutes.
Remarks from Alumni Association President Bert Deacon
'77:
Mr. Deacon made it very clear that the sentiments from alumni -
across the United States - canvassing all generations -
represented a broad breadth of disappointment and concern that
Mr. Liddy was the 1999 Commencement Speaker at VMI. Mr. Deacon
has expressed his views, on behalf of VMI Alumni, to the
Superintendent and the President of the Board of Visitors,
regarding the sentiments from alumni. Earlier this spring, the
President of the Board of Visitors and Mr. Deacon met with
approximately 15 leaders of the Corps and encouraged these First
Class leaders to reconsider this selection. Mr. Deacon said that
this year's First Class, on average, were born five years after
Watergate and the cadets view Mr. Liddy as a conservative talk
show host, nothing more. More importantly, Mr. Deacon said that
although the VMI family as a whole does not support his
selection, it is important to support the First Class's right to
choose whomever they desire. Mr. Deacon considered this a most
regrettable, but dead issue.
Mr. Deacon thanked the Committee Chairmen and their respective
members for the hard work they have done on behalf of the
Association and VMI. Assisting and supporting VMI, the
Association is moving forward on multiple priorities to include
Academics, the Co-curriculum, Athletics, Recruiting, Nominating
and Alumni Placement. Strong emphasis within the Co-curriculum is
placed on restoring the VMI Dyke System and a number of alumni -
from a wide variety of classes - will be attending an all day
session in Lexington with the incoming leaders of the First Class
to discuss the dyke system. Col. Joyner will chair the meeting.
Later in the summer another meeting will be scheduled with the
upcoming nine class officers with former alumni who were class
officers ranging from the 40's through the 80's. The purpose of
the meeting is to pass along the various experiences and styles
from these former leaders in the corps and to communicate the
legacy of the class system - and how these gentlemen led their
respective first class and barracks.
Remarks from the Superintendent:
The Superintendent began his remarks by stating that
applications for admission to VMI are up significantly with about
1200 applications this years compared to 890 in 1995. We are
encouraged by the increase but still have a great deal of work to
do. Out-of-state applications from Virginia have decreased, but
we will continue to work on this aspect of our program.
The estimated new female matriculates in the fall of 1999 will be
about 40 - giving us a total of approximately 90 young women or
8% of the Corps. He then stated that VMI would be back in court
on April 16th because the Justice Department doesn't feel that we
are giving sufficient information on the assimilation of women at
the Institute.
General Bunting announced plans for a major conference on the
Korean War to be held at VMI on Sept. 14, 2000 which coincides
with the war's 50th anniversary. Along with our alumni who were a
part of that war, we will invite people from all over the
country, scholars, writers, soldiers and also special guests from
Korea, Russia and China to participate in this major American
retrospective on that war. As you know, General Marshall played a
significant role in the war and some of his important papers are
here in the Marshall Library.
There are many small missions at VMI and all merge into a larger
purpose. The purpose is the education of young people who will be
patriotic Americans with integrity and intelligence and whose
instinct will be to lead to and take positions of responsibility.
With all of the hundreds of traditions, customs, regulations and
expectations we have at VMI, to this larger end there is a wider
culture at the Institute within which all of this takes place.
When we ask "how are things in barracks?" we refer
specifically to this culture. The largest influence on that
culture is the America of 1999. It is a world that is
extraordinary different from the world of the 40s, 50s and 60s.
It is an American culture that underwrites and expects instant
gratification. It is obsessed with possessions and status. It is
a culture in which sexual and other moralities are much different
from the way they were honored in our time. I should remind all
of you again that almost all of our cadets come from high schools
where virtually everyone cheats or tolerates those who do cheat,
where almost everyone drinks alcohol or uses drugs or both; and
where almost no one goes into the military. These considerations
impose new challenges to VMI. The principles that undergird our
convictions do no change and they will not change, but when
imposing them or teaching them to our cadets, we must from time
to time adapt our needs and methodologies to the tenor of the
times.
The best instruments in working VMI's magic are superb professors
and administrators, leaders and coaches. The most potent agent of
education anywhere is for an adult who lives his own life in full
view of those he leads and teaches; in which life is lived
according to a set of standards from which he tries not to
deviate. I've always believed this and I am certain most VMI men
believe it. When you look on your high school years or time at
VMI you remember certain people like John McKenna, Herbert
Dillard or Doc Carroll. There are hundreds of these icons, it is
your memory of their philosophy and discipline which reminds you
of what kind of people they were and this strengthens your own
convictions about how you should live your life some 20, 30 or 50
years down the pike.
One of the areas in which we have done poorly and which I have
done poorly at VMI, has to do with the relationships with the
different sub-groups on Post to other groups. I want to be as
precise as I can when I talk about this. A large instance of what
I am going to talk about concerns the foreseen breach and the
real breach between the athletes and non-athletes. All of you
know about it. We talk about it. We deplore it. We resent it. We
have diagnosed it and now we're going to fix it. The tendency at
VMI is to marinate in diagnosis. We have to move quickly to
prescription and implementation. About one-third of the Corps
participates in varsity sports, about 400 of our cadets, male and
female. There are 13 active intercollegiate sports and a number
of club sports. In the current climate in 1999 among varsity
athletes, the expectation is that athletes will follow that sport
all year round. If you walk around the parade ground on October
1, you will see some 60 lacrosse players practicing fiercely for
some two hours as they do four or five days a week. Their season
begins in March and ends early in May, but even in a sport like
lacrosse, a middle ranking college sport, fairly interesting in
this part of the country, they train all year round. Varsity
athletes are on permit and most of them train year round.
If you have a child that goes to a college that cost $31,000 a
year, we use the word tuition, but actually the tuition is about
$20,000 and the rest is room and board and other incidentals. We
use the word athletics in the same spirit at VMI as a synonym for
football. We talk about athletics but most of us in the back of
our brains have the idea of football. I want to talk a few
minutes about football because it is something to which we devote
a huge amount of psychic energy, great amounts of money, much
emotion and much time, not to mention the 80 athletes and 55 full
scholarships.
We need this fall to fuse the football team with the Corps of
Cadets - bring them together, to bound them, to heal them, and
repair this breach. To do this we have to do two things
successfully and at the same time. First, we have to confirm and
assure that all players and all members of the Corps understand
that the players are fully fledged, full-time cadets before they
are football players and that they are athletes second. All Rat
football players must understand that they are rats and VMI
cadets before football. They must understand that their paramount
mission and our paramount mission is an academic education.
Second, we have to give them the means and chance to compete
successfully with other colleges. We have to do both of these at
the same time. If we can't, we have no business trying to play
football here at any level. Col. Leroy Hammond and Donny White,
our athletic director, and a number of cadets and faculty members
have been working for four months on a program taking the form of
a set of expectations and new initiatives which I think will go a
long way toward ending this breach. I should say in the
beginning, in that regard, that West Point, Annapolis and Air
Force academies have something of an advantage over us, not only
for obvious reasons, but also because they bring in their Rats,
or first year cadets, in late June and run them through a very
hard, very physically demanding nine week ratline. And that
involves every football player, every lacrosse player and every
poet - everyone you can think of, no exceptions are made. At the
end of that nine-week period they actually have a ceremony in
which the plebes are welcomed into their companies. Thereafter,
they are treated as plebes but without the constant grinding
attention being given as we do our rats here at VMI. In other
words, the football players who are plebes go through this very
tough right of passage as everyone else and they finish it and
move on to the regular school year with the other upperclassmen.
It means for us at VMI, a larger more conservative test rather
than contempt for a 17-year old that comes to this school to be a
cadet and hopes to play football. We must assure that our rats go
through and are perceived as going through the same early demands
of the rat system as everyone else. At the same time what they
are doing will demand a much better and more vivid appreciation
by the rest of the Corps about what college football demands and
a respect for that effort. Rat football players arrive at VMI on
August 6th and they will have almost three weeks of two and
three-a-day practice sessions and then during the last week they
will have the cadre period. They are rats and will be exposed to
all the demands of the ratline. But the third classmen who are
charged with their immediate supervision, the third class
corporals, will start off with an attitude which says, "This
is a good kid who's trying very hard, who wants to be a VMI
cadet; and being a football player is NOT a sin."
VMI, in the last few years, has developed a kind of mean
spiritedness among certain groups in barracks and one of those
groups, a fairly large number of thirds and sometimes second
classmen, mostly devoted to the military aspect of this school,
take an immediate contemptuous attitude towards all athletes,
even towards good kids who are trying very hard. One of the
things that has been recommended by this study group, will be a
concerted effort to try to educate the upperclassmen returning
early to the realities of the demands imposed by Division I
athletics. In effect we are saying to them, you can help VMI make
a choice as to our future. Our new coach, Cal McCombs, a graduate
of The Citadel, class of 1967, and his entire staff most
enthusiastically underwrites this effort. Cal was at Air Force
Academy for 15 years, is the old-fashioned Southern football
disciplinarian, much charisma, large amount of imagination, loves
this school and the whole aspect of the school and believes that
you can have a football program in this culture and make it
successful if you use it as an ally, not an enemy. I expect he is
going to do this. Most of his talks to the team have been about
academics and military, not just football. Every alumnus should
be proud of this staff and hopefully, will give them a chance to
bring the Corps and the team together. We owe it to them to give
our support.
The superintendent concluded his remarks with a brief statement
concerning the G. Gordon LIddy episode. If you want to blame
someone directly and personally, blame me. I regard it as my
fault and a failure of leadership on my part. I'm willing to take
the full blame for that. I've had a good superintendency but I
have made some mistakes and this is a bad one. The minute I heard
the man's name I should have come down on them like this an Otis,
but I didn't - so blame me.
Future updates will include other excerpts from the Alumni
Association meeting minutes.
Cyber Corps T-Shirts, Polo Shirts, etc: And,
here's some information about VMI Cyber Corps gear...
Polo Shirts - Blake and Hollister
7 oz Vertical Raised stitch pique
s - xl: $30
xxl: $32
Hats - the Final Word in Headwear
6 panel washed cotton w/leather strap
$15
T-shirts - Fruit of the Loom super cotton
7 oz 100% cotton jersey
all sizes are $10
This is just to give everyone a ball park idea of the prices.
This week I'll check into seeing how much it'll cost to get them
shipped to those that place orders. I believe that we have to
order them in lots of 12, but I'll double check on this. I don't
imagine shipping will be too expensive, but I'll look into it. If
you want to get a look at the Cyber Corps logo, go to the
Electronic Turnouts site. But please remember that the Cyber
Corps logo is drawn to scale unlike the one found at that
website. Just imagine a regular VMI spider with the Cyber Corps
wording and the lightning bolt through it. Electronic turnout
site address is: http://www.rtp.opensystems.com/vmi/turnout.htm.
More info next week!
That's it for this week.
RB Lane '75
Last Updated: October 11, 2009
Site Created by: Richard L. Neff II, '90 - Network Technologies Group