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Before 1996, the Virginia Military Institute issued each of its first-year cadets, known as “rats,” a booklet that they were required to keep in their possession at all times. Included in the booklet was “The Code of a Gentleman,” which exhorts VMI men to follow a chivalrous set of axioms. Among these:

A Gentleman does not speak more than casually about his girlfriend.

A Gentleman does not go to a lady’s house if he is affected by alcohol.

A Gentleman never discusses the merits or demerits of a lady. 

A Gentleman does not slap strangers on the back nor so much as lay a finger on a lady.

By March of 1998, twenty-three young women, heads shaved, joined 361 male rats in the traditional “breakout,” marking the transition from rat to freshman. Rats embark on a grueling, 15-mile, forced march at midnight—often in the freezing snow of a Western Virginia early spring—before returning to the post (as the VMI campus is called) to scale a steep mud-covered hill. This is no ordinary hike or hill. Colonel Norman M. Bissel, a former VMI commandant of cadets, described scaling the hill at breakout as such:

As you can imagine, as you are going through this mud and slop, people are climbing over each other, entangled with each other... Frequently there is a lot of exposure to bodies where clothes are ripped, as you can well imagine from pulling and tugging, there are a lot of body exposure factors going on there.

In two years, VMI had gone from an institution premised on forming chivalrous gentlemen, to one in which the pinnacle of the first year is young men and women crawling and clamoring through the freezing mud beside each other.

This was not an organic change. It was the result of years of court battles over co-education at the Virginia Military Institute, culminating in a 7–1 vote in United States v. Virginia (1996). In a majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court cited the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to end 157 years of an all-male corps of cadets at VMI. Justice Thomas, whose son was a member of the all-male VMI corps at the time of the case, recused himself. Justice Scalia was the lone, characteristically scathing dissent.

The decision has had far-reaching consequences. An amicus brief that bore the names of groups like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum warned that the majority’s legal reasoning might later force gender integration of bathrooms and school athletic teams, permit homosexual marriage, and require government funding for abortions. In a post-Obergefell world now in the throes of a heated debate over transgender bathrooms and women’s sports, it’s difficult to deny the connection. 

But as illustrated by the new co-ed “breakout” tradition, the Virginia Military Institute itself was most directly affected by the case. It’s here that the tragedy of United States v. Virginia surpasses the very real harm it has caused to the country’s jurisprudence and sexual mores. It took aim at an institution committed to forming not only gentlemen, but Virginia gentlemen. It was a critical catalyst for the continued deterioration of local culture and loyalty to place. The case really was the United States versus Virginia.

To understand Virginia, one must understand the Virginia Military Institute. No, not the modern Virginia that is dominated by the country’s wealthiest counties and military contractors, but the commonwealth as it existed before the massive influx of recent arrivals from places as foreign as San Salvador and Foggy Bottom. This Virginia has long been eclipsed in the formerly Southern towns in the northern part of the state. But it still lives on in places like the Shenandoah Valley. And it’s here, at the Valley’s Southern tip, that you’ll find VMI.

One need not make it all the way to the post in Lexington to receive an introduction to the VMI ethos. Not long after emerging into the picturesque Valley past Front Royal, the red-and-yellow VMI logo peeks out to travelers off the right side of Interstate 81 South. This is the Virginia Museum of the Civil War, situated next to the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park and owned by VMI. On May 11, 1861, 241 VMI cadets left Lexington in haste and walked eighty miles north to New Market to provide urgent reinforcements. They marched into battle carrying the colors not of the Confederacy, but of VMI—the only student body of an American college to ever fight as a unit. 

The VMI cadets succeeded in pushing back Union forces from their Virginia homeland, but paid the price. Ten cadets died in the battle, six of whom are interred on post. They lie at the foot of the prominent statue, “Virginia Mourning Her Dead,” sculpted by Jewish cadet Moses Ezekiel, who fought alongside his fallen brothers at the Battle of New Market.

For decades, VMI cadets honored the sacrifice of these ten forebears every year with a solemn ceremony and parade. Many VMI cadets would further commemorate those who marched under the VMI colors by retracing their footsteps on the eighty-mile trek from Lexington to New Market. But in 2021, the school’s administration distanced itself from the New Market traditions, claiming that that year’s ceremony would instead honor all cadets who died in service to the country. Six months prior, the school removed the statue of former VMI professor of natural philosophy Thomas Jonathan Jackson from post. The man better known as “Stonewall” was once so revered that cadets were required to salute his statue when passing by. One wonders how long Lady Virginia will be allowed to continue mourning her Civil War dead. 

Like many Southern institutions, VMI was slow to wrestle with the racial injustices of the nation’s past. The Institute didn’t racially integrate until 1968. But contrary to Justice Ginsburg’s reasoning in United States v. Virginia, race and sex are not alike, and racial integration did not profoundly change the VMI experience. Shortly after integration, anxious national media asked a new black cadet if he was receiving equal treatment while experiencing the rigors of the rat line. He replied, laughing, “This is the most equal place I ever heard of. Here they treat everybody like a n—.”

In a sense, racial integration at VMI was possible precisely because of the fraternal and adversarial nature of the institution that was destroyed by United States vs. Virginia. The VMI Code of a Gentleman speaks to old-fashioned virtues that are both necessary to engender a proper filial piety to one’s home and capable of weeding out a vice like racial animus. Ours is now a culture and legal regime that scorns traditional virtue. It’s no wonder the goal of racial equality has transformed into equity. Chivalry is slandered as sexism.

We need institutions like the old VMI, fiercely loyal to their place and its sons, now more than ever. United States vs. Virginia was a disaster for legal reasoning. But it was also a disaster for Virginia. 

Once Justice Ginsburg’s opinion was handed down, VMI Superintendent Josiah Bunting, who had fiercely opposed co-education, was tasked with implementing the Court’s decision. Bunting, ever the obedient soldier, understood the need to uphold the rule of law, but he would continue to illustrate what was lost in doing so. He lambasted the “culture of Washington and New York” that “sees VMI as brutal, anachronistic, reactionary. They have it wrong. We’re really nothing of the kind. This is a place of dignity and honor.”

To restore dignity and honor to Virginia—and all the places we call home—let’s start by reversing United States vs. Virginia.