Patriotic Bunting

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by Richard Lowry

MEET Josiah Bunting and you want to snap to attention and bark, "Yes, sir!" Major General Bunting, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, is 6'4" and seems taller. He has the short hair and strong jaw of a Marine, and when he tells of leading VMI cadets on a 15-mile march last year, the only wonder is that it wasn't longer. Then he explains this year's plan: 82 miles.

Bunting is rugged, a disciplinarian who talks of VMI's rigors --"the minute regulation of behavior," as he puts it -- with relish. But he gets just as excited talking about Newman. Or Thucydides. Or Plato. He tosses off words like "eupeptic" and "plangent," and makes enough literary references to fill a George Will column.

In his new book, An Education for Our Time (Regnery, $24.95), Bunting outlines his notion of the ideal college, a place devoted to the creation of similarly tough and well-read men and women. Bunting is a walking rebuke to academic fashion who hopes to rally the remnants to a vision of education suffused with duty, honor, and traditional liberal-arts learning. Wish him luck.

Bunting himself graduated from VMI in 1963. He won a Rhodes scholarship, and then served in Vietnam before embarking on a distinguished career as an educator that could have ended in the presidency of a major college. Instead, he returned to VMI, where the handful of grey stucco buildings look like a fortress and students are every day reminded of the ten VMI cadets who died in a charge during the Battle of New Market in 1864.

Bunting is right at home. VMI is his "little platoon," an organic institution fulfilling a need for ceremony, rules, and fraternity that liberal rationalists will never quite understand (high on Bunting's list of scourges is the by-the-numbers architect of Vietnam, Robert McNamara). It also exists completely outside the soft culture of the 1990s. Mention, say, "stress management" classes and Bunting squinches his eyes in disgust before letting rip with a characteristic "Give me a [expletive] break!"

An Education for Our Time takes the form of an epistolary novel, the letters of a dying mutli-millionaire to his lawyer describing the new institution he wants to endow. The highest purpose of the school won't be training its students for specific careers or future graduate work, but fostering active and responsible citizens, "not least . . . by leading them to fall in love with their country."

The idea is to create in students "active and prudent minds and the will to act." There are required outdoor "treks" and spartan living arrangements (shades of VMI), but also a curriculum that emphasizes the classics, history and biography, and foreign languages. Needless to say, there will be no condom dispensers in the bathrooms nor any mandatory classes on Maya Angelou.

Bunting hopes his ideas will light a spark in a conservative philanthropist somewhere. Meanwhile, he watches the culture take its Baby Boomer-led slide into what he calls, for lack of a better term, "Lewinskyism" ("a deeply vulgar phenomenon, deeply vulgar," he says of Clinton).

VMI, for some 150 years, was an oasis in the midst of the larger culture and its trends, quietly turning out its fiercely loyal alumni. But it also served as a standing rebuke to liberal pieties, and in 1989 it was sued to force it to admit women. After seven years of fighting the suit, it lost in the Supreme Court. Bunting, following orders, is doing his best to accommodate women at the school, but no one pretends that the chemistry of VMI won't inevitably change.

In 1997, the last all-male corps of cadets held a ceremony to mark the passing of the old VMI. Cadets stuck their sabers in the ground and hung their shakos on them, a way of marking the passing of a brother-in-arms. At the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer provided an epitaph of his own. Told the VMI way of life would disappear, he replied, "So what?"