Dear John,
For nearly two centuries, the Virginia Military Institute stood as one of America’s most distinctive and demanding citadels of masculine formation—producing citizen-soldiers of honor, grit, and discipline who served in every war from the Civil War to Afghanistan. Its adversative method, its storied “rat line,” and its ancient Code of a Gentleman were deliberately designed to forge men.
That mission has now been dismantled by an ideology that too many still consider harmless: feminism.
In October, The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life released Not Enough Good Men: Gender Integration and the Collapse of the Virginia Military Institute, an important report by our Washington Fellow Dr. Scott Yenor. With meticulous evidence, Dr. Yenor documents how the Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in United States v. Virginia—and the gender-DEI revolution that followed—eviscerated VMI’s founding purpose.
Across VMI’s campus, traditions designed to form strong men were replaced with bureaucratic systems designed to meet ideological demands:
- Physical standards were slashed. Women must perform only one pull-up; men still perform five.
- The historic Code of a Gentleman was replaced with a politically correct “Code of a Cadet.”
- Student-led honor and discipline were supplanted by Title IX offices and DEI administrators.
- Unlocked barracks doors—central to unit formation—gave way to locks, cameras, and “safe spaces.”
Justice Ginsburg predicted in 1996 that admitting women would scarcely change VMI.
The opposite has occurred. VMI has been fundamentally transformed—and not for the better.
As Dr. Yenor conclusively demonstrates, VMI’s fate is a warning to every institution that surrenders its mission to the false gods of “equity” and “inclusion.”
This report has already triggered investigations by Virginia state officials and federal probes into similar failures at other service academies—proof that serious scholarship can still move public policy.
