Virginia Military Institute

Virginia Military Institute (VMI), public institution of higher learning in Lexington, Virginia, U.S. It is a state military college modeled on the U.S. service academies. Students are referred to as cadets; all cadets enroll in U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs. VMI offers undergraduate degree programs in engineering, computer science, business, economics, international studies, and arts and sciences. Campus facilities include the George C. Marshall Museum and Library (1964). Total enrollment is approximately 1,200.

The institute, the first state-supported military college in the United States, was founded in 1839. During the American Civil War the institute was converted into an emergency training school. Almost all of the institute’s cadets and faculty fought in the war; the cadet corps fought as a unit for the Confederates in an 1864 battle at New Market, Virginia. Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was a professor at VMI of artillery tactics and natural philosophy, and naval explorer and inventor Matthew Fontaine Maury also taught there. The school was burned to the ground by Union troops in June 1864, but it reopened in October 1865 and was soon rebuilt. The Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hall contains Benjamin Clinedinst’s mural depicting the cadets’ heroic charge at New Market. General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, graduated from the institute.

In 1990 the U.S. Justice Department ruled that the school’s male-only admissions policy was unconstitutional. In response, the institute established an associated military program for women at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, in 1995. Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the admissions policy was unconstitutional, and the school admitted its first women cadets in 1997.