THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 17, 1996 TAG: 9602170010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By JOSIAH BUNTING
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
He looked at it from within, (seeing) it with the eyes of a believer in it presumption that was not altogether a fallacy.
- ``Coleridge,'' by J. S. Mill
Only 25 years old in 1864, the institute was much more a Confederate Eton than a West Point, half its boys barely 16 or 17, almost all of them Virginians, a quarter of their number to become casualties of war in a small untidy encounter with a federal army, halfway up the Shenandoah Valley at New Market. One cadet, Thomas Garland Jefferson of Amelia County, died in the arms of an older boy, Moses Ezekiel, who recited to him the desperate cadences of comfort for St. John . . . ``In my Father's house are many mansions.'' The others returned to their school; the head of another Union army burnt it to the ground a few weeks later, and their little remnant reformed after the war ended.
It has never been a federal academy with the mission of training and preparing officers for the regular armed forces - less than 20 percent of its graduates have made careers in the service. No, VMI has grown and evolved as a school quietly devoted to the notion that young men living together in a military setting and regimen, while undergoing a course of academic instruction, will surely take from their years here an array of habits and lived convictions - of conscience, heart, intellect or selfless allegiance to principle and to friend - that will tend to make them useful men of affairs for the commerce and service of the republic. At their head, perhaps their most perdurably famous son, whom Churchill called the noblest Roman of them all, is George Catlett Marshall, whose statue the cadets see every morning of their lives, all four years, as they assemble for Reveille formation. Fifty feet away stands another monument - the work of Sir Moses Ezekiel - of the mighty Stonewall Jackson, who left his professorship of physics at the institute to become, quickly, a tactician of genius and a merciless inspirer of men. His was the eccentricity of true unselfconscious autonomy, of a Victorian's simple faith in right action as he conceived it - just as Marshall's quiet allegiance to duty and country, the very converse of military vainglory, seemed, an observer noted, ``to put ambition out of countenance.''
It is a sound thing to sustain such a place, as it was, and as it yet labors to be - a college for a few score young men whose ethos is defined by the living legacies of its Great Ones. That ethos - the yeast and tang, the core of conviction that marks out the greatest colleges - is invariably distinguished by an indifference to the greater world's opinion of it, and by a steady determination to make its way in allegiance to its own legacies and beliefs. You tamper with that ethos at great peril to the institution, and therefore to those it educates.
Young men using the opportunity to be educated in this way - that is, among other young men only, in a military regimen, in an academic curriculum of great vitality - must not be denied their opportunity: to live their brotherhood in this small turreted world of vigilantly sustained tension between discipline, with its spare reduction of things to naked clarity, and value, which seeks out the frailties and fears and glories of human nature. Their brotherhood, their bond, in which they live together in circumstances of absolute, astringent equality: learning in their lives here to live the legacies of Jackson and Marshall both: the lessons of resolution - ``You May Be Whatever You Resolve To Be,'' as it says over the great entrance arch to the barracks; and of indifference to the world's opinion of you, so long as you have done your duty; and of judging men and institutions according only to standards of excellence and of allegiance to principle.
To seize the aggressive impulse of the young American adolescent male, to refine, chasten, mold and direct it toward the world of ideas and images, to send him confidently out into the tumult of public affairs in a country grown corrupt with easy gratification and assumed ``entitlements,'' this is surely a mission that needs to be pronounced and lived here, at VMI, as powerfully in 1996 as it was in 1864. This Band of Brothers, which has made its case with great and compelling dignity and forbearance, must be projected into another age; not as a Band of Persons, but as a school, one of but four or five in a nation of 3,000 colleges, that understands that some few young men respond to what it yet believes it is called upon to offer; and whose record, as a military institute for young men, utterly sustains its confidence in the continuing value of this kind of education.He looked at it from within, (seeing) it with the eyes of a believer in it . . . he considered the long or extensive prevalence of an opinion as a presumption that was not altogether a fallacy.
- ``Coleridge,'' by J. S. Mill by CNB