April 7, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: As a classmate of Tom Watjen, former president of the VMI board of visitors (BOV), I read with interest his statement titled, “A Perspective on Virginia Military Institute,” appearing in your newspaper. Although Tom and I share the VMI experience in that we are members of the class of 1976, are both grateful for those four years at VMI, and seek the best for our alma mater and the corps of cadets, we have a different perspective as to how that is achieved.
The statement that I would like to address and happen to agree with centers around the vast disparity between how executives in the corporate world would respond to a crisis versus how the BOV and superintendent responded to a manufactured crisis in 2020 when a letter came from the Governor’s office accusing VMI having an “appalling culture of ongoing structural racism.”
What kind of executive team would implement nearly every recommendation in a report that they determined the findings not being supported by facts and then to be “grateful” for those recommendations as was done with the Barnes & Thornburg report?
What executive team would make changes to a system without performing a root cause analysis and being supplied evidence concluding that the system is performing exactly as it is designed to do as was done with the Honor System?
What executive team proclaiming they support free speech would then find itself being criticized by organizations protecting free speech for infringing upon it as has been the case with VMI?
The VMI BOV and superintendent have fostered division. VMI must return the focus to honor, meritocracy, excellence and the common bond shared by a diverse group and away from the destructive and divisive ideology of DEI that he and others have implemented.
CARMEN D. VILLANI JR. VMI, Class of 1976 Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
