Virginia

In clash over VMI’s future, Youngkin appoints conservatives to board

The picks by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) were applauded by alumni resisting change at Virginia Military Institute

By Ian Shapira
July 2, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

In his first major step to shape the future of the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Thursday named four White, mostly conservative members to the Board of Visitors at the Virginia Military Institute, including a former member who resigned in 2020 right before the vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson from the campus. ...The 182-year-old school, whose cadets fought and died for the South during the Civil War, has been mired in allegations of racism and sexism that continue to divide alumni into rival camps of those who support change and those resisting it.

Two of the four new board members appointed by Youngkin are well-known in Republican political circles or within the conservative alumni wing. John Adams, a McGuire Woods lawyer who graduated from VMI in 1996, ran unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee for Virginia attorney general in 2017. Adams, a former clerk for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and his law firm were tapped by the VMI Alumni Agencies to help it defend the school against an independent investigation ordered by Gov. Ralph Northam (D) into the college. The state-funded probe concluded that the school has a “racist and sexist culture” and must change.

A second Youngkin pick is Thomas “Teddy” Gottwald, the former VMI board member. Gottwald, who graduated from VMI in 1983, resigned his seat in October 2020 right before the body voted to remove the Jackson statue from its prominent perch on the Lexington campus. The head of a petroleum additives holding company, Gottwald donated $77,500 to Youngkin’s campaign and another $25,000 to the Spirit of VMI political action committee, a group of alumni that has denigrated and mocked the investigation and reforms the college has made in response to its findings.

[Virginia Military Institute alumni push to reverse diversity reforms]

The two other new board members are Ernest Edgar, a 1987 VMI graduate who is the general counsel of an engineering design and construction firm called Atkins North America, according to his LinkedIn page, and Meaghan Mobbs, a 2008 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., who is a consulting and public affairs firm vice president. She worked as a senior policy adviser to the Youngkin campaign, according to her bio on the website of her firm. ... Mobbs, a former member of the Board of Visitors at the U.S. Military Academy, made news last year when she and other Trump appointees serving on similar boards at the Naval and Air Force academies were asked by the Biden administration to resign or be fired. Mobbs refused to quit and tweeted that she found the move “unconscionable.”

Link to tweet

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By Ian Shapira
Ian Shapira is a features writer on the local enterprise team. Twitter https://twitter.com/ianshapira