A VMI student newspaper won a major prize. But now there are questions. ·

13 Aug 2024, 00:00

When the Virginia Press Association handed out its annual journalism awards in early May, the big winner was a little college newspaper. The Cadet, produced by students at the Virginia Military Institute, took home the top prize — for “Journalistic Integrity and Community Service” — for editorials and articles about the school’s contentious diversity issues.

The Cadet was the first student paper to win the integrity prize in the 75 years since the association started awarding it. Making its victory all the sweeter was the fact that the paper, moribund since 2016, had just been revived in 2021 as an independent publication.

But what started out as a story of young amateurs beating the pros has taken on new coloring in the weeks since the Cadet’s editors received a standing ovation at the awards banquet.

The press association is now investigating whether the paper’s win was tainted by an undisclosed conflict of interest: the fact that the Cadet’s “senior mentor” is a VMI alumnus who has waged a legal battle against the school diversity programs that the student journalists have been covering. The alum, Bob Morris, helped revive the paper in 2021 and heads the nonprofit foundation that underwrites it.

About a week after the awards, a news site called Cardinal News called attention to the Cadet’s connections to Morris, a 1979 VMI graduate who has filed lawsuits over a state-ordered investigation of alleged discrimination at VMI and the school’s adoption of a diversity, equity and inclusion program. Last week, the VPA’s executive director told The Washington Post that the organization has hired an attorney to investigate its award decision.

“The question is: Did [the Cadet] win fairly, did it follow all our rules, and, if not, what should we do about it?” said Betsy Edwards, who directs the press association. “At this point, I don’t have an answer.”

Morris told The Post that the Cadet’s VPA honors validate its work but did not respond to specific questions about his involvement.

The Cadet’s failure to disclose the conflict posed by Morris’s litigation, though, may not be the only problem with the Cadet’s journalism.

One story submitted by the paper for the competition appears to have been partially plagiarized from a press release issued by a VMI alumni group, Protect Honor, that has generally opposed VMI’s DEI initiatives. Though Protect Honor doesn’t appear to list its founders or writers, its website domain is registered to Morris.

More than a dispute about a prize, however, the award controversy is framed by the long-running tensions inside VMI over its efforts to reconcile its unique history and proudly insular culture with contemporary notions of racial and gender fairness.

Founded in 1839, VMI is the oldest state-supported military college in the nation. Most of its graduates who were living at the time fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and one of its most venerated figures has been Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a former VMI professor. For generations, ranks of cadets marched under a prominent arch named for Jackson and saluted a statue of him on the parade grounds.

At VMI, two classmates — one Black, one White — war over school’s future

The school admitted its first Black students in 1968, the last public college in the state to do so. Women were admitted in 1997 after the Supreme Court ruled their exclusion was unconstitutional.

But allegations of discrimination have continued for years. Following a Washington Post investigation in October 2020 that revealed racist incidents at the school, then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D), himself a VMI alum, ordered an investigation of the school’s racial climate and culture.

VMI subsequently removed the Jackson statue and hired its first Black superintendent, retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, a 1985 VMI graduate. It also implemented a DEI program led by two Black women. All cadets are now required to take a 50-minute diversity-training session each year, according to school spokesman Bill Wyatt.

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Those efforts have elicited pushback from White conservative VMI alums, via a political action committee called the Spirit of VMI, which views DEI as divisive and a threat to VMI’s traditions and merit-based system.

In a statement on its website earlier this year, the PAC’s chairman, Matt Daniel, said DEI “promotes racial division, encourages victimhood, and engages in shaming or protecting individuals based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious or moral beliefs.”

As the state-ordered investigation of VMI neared its end in 2021, Morris began efforts to revive the Cadet, raising money through a nonprofit entity called the Cadet Foundation. He serves as the foundation’s president and treasurer, according to its most recent IRS filing.

Although it took its name from the dormant school paper and features the work of VMI students, the Cadet is privately funded and isn’t officially affiliated with the school. The paper is supported, in part, by advertising. Among its leading advertisers is the Spirit of VMI PAC, which often takes full- or half-page ads in its print edition.

The Cadet’s award-winning articles included several that urge an open mind and respect for diverse viewpoints about the DEI program. But much of the newspaper’s work was skeptical about, if not downright hostile to, the changes VMI has undertaken.

“The Case for Preserving Tradition — Why VMI may NOT be changing for the good,” reads the headline on one of the 15 articles the paper submitted to the awards competition. The column, carrying the byline of a VMI cadet, went on: “Recently, we have opened ourselves up to the outside world and [allowed] those with no understanding of our systems and culture to radically alter those systems. … Opening ourselves up to the outside world will never benefit the VMI mission.”

Another column, attributed to an unnamed VMI professor, asserted last year that the school has implemented “a radical new social activist program” that is “killing the school.” The “wokeness” behind DEI, wrote the author, divides “the Corps in unintended ways by separating it into various identity groups based on race, gender, gender identity, sexual proclivities, class and yet-unknown markers.”

A third story in its entry casts an appreciative light on a civil suit that had challenged VMI’s procedures for hiring one of its DEI contractors. The story notes that the plaintiff, an unsuccessful bidder for the contract, is a firm called the Center for Applied Innovation.

It doesn’t mention the name of the firm’s founder and president: Bob Morris.

It’s the second of two lawsuits that CAI filed in connection to VMI. In early 2021, Morris’s firm also challenged a state contract with a law firm hired to investigate VMI following The Post’s disclosures. That suit was dismissed.

The Cadet’s story about the second CAI lawsuit is the one that contains passages nearly identical to a Project Honor press release issued two months earlier. Both the press release and the Cadet story, for example, include this sentence (slightly modified in the Cadet): “Records also show VMI developing a deliberate campaign to lobby or otherwise influence the Youngkin administration in Richmond and a plan to deal with persons who criticize the Chief Diversity Officer.”

A fourth Cadet story submitted to the awards competition, concerning the school’s mental health counseling services, was vigorously disputed last year by VMI’s administrators, who said it mischaracterized events, misstated dates and distorted the center’s record and expertise.

Later, after VMI’s deputy superintendent condemned the story in an email blast to students that also called out Morris’s involvement, school spokesman Wyatt said he received a message from the student who wrote it, saying that he was aware of the errors and that the story should never have been published. Nonetheless, it won first place in an investigative reporting category at the Virginia press awards.

In an email to The Post, Morris said the Cadet “has done an incredible job portraying the news and has been open to articles and editorials that portray both sides.”

After attempting to reach the newspaper’s staff for comment, The Post received an email from Morris containing a statement in the name of three current and former editors, asserting the Cadet’s independence: “The final call is and has always been the cadets on the editorial staff,” the statement read.

The Post was able to independently reach one of the named students, James Mansfield, who confirmed that he had signed onto the statement sent by Morris.

VMI officials, however, have been wary about Morris’s influence over the Cadet’s reporting. Wyatt said that he has frequently received emails from generic Cadet email accounts — “editor@cadetnewspaper.org,” for example, instead of an address that includes a student’s name — seeking information and comment for articles. The newspaper’s emails are sent from the same server as Morris’s company’s, according to a Post review of email records and data from cybersecurity company DomainTools. That server also hosts the Cadet’s website.

Edwards, the VPA director, said its investigator would look into what role, if any, Morris played in shaping the Cadet’s articles and whether the paper was sufficiently transparent in its award entry. “We’ll review [the investigator’s] recommendations and determine what action to take,” she said.

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A VMI student newspaper won a major prize. But now there are questions.

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