Gov. Glenn Youngkin is nominating Congressman Ben Cline’s deputy chief of staff to a spot on the VMI Board of Visitors, doubling down on the anti-DEI push that would seem to imperil the future of the school’s superintendent, Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, a Black VMI alum.
Youngkin’s office announced on Wednesday that the governor has nominated Jonathan Hartsock, a 2000 alum of VMI who served as the school’s deputy commandant before joining Cline’s office staff in the summer of 2023, at a hefty annual salary – $128,000 in calendar year 2024, according to the database at LegiStorm.
The governor also nominated 1984 VMI alum Stephen G. Reardon of Richmond, an attorney with Spotts Fain and small-potatoes Republican donor, to a second open VMI Board spot.
The fresh nominations are replacements for two nominees from Youngkin that were rejected by the Democrat-majority General Assembly earlier this year – Quintin Elliott and Clifford Foster, who were set to replace two Ralph Northam appointees, Scot Marsh and Gussie Lord.
The battle over the nominees is set against the backdrop of the future of Wins, a 1985 VMI alum who has served as the superintendent at his alma mater since 2020, overseeing an effort to address what a state-commissioned report termed “an overall racist and sexist culture” at the school, which the report said “maintains an outdated, idealized reverence for the Civil War and the Confederacy.”
Youngkin appointees to the VMI Board of Visitors, who now comprise a majority of the board, have taken up the cause of anti-DEI critics who have argued that “DEI is ‘unnecessary,’ promotes racial division and urge others to ‘reject the woke assault on VMI.’”
That characterization comes from State Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy, a 2003 VMI alum who Cline alleged, in a Feb. 18 letter to Virginia General Assembly leaders, threatened VMI’s state funding if the Board of Visitors were to decide to cut bait with Wins as superintendent.
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Cline, in the letter, demanded that the legislature launch an ethics investigation into Carroll Foy – Cline claimed that Carroll Foy pressured an unnamed VMI Board of Visitors member to give Wins a four-year contract extension because he is Black, a patently outrageous assertion that she has vigorously denied.
State Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell characterized Cline’s request for an ethics investigation as “preposterous” in an interview with The Virginia Mercury, saying Youngkin “has been trying to influence our universities through his board picks and through the budget process for the last three years,” and if a state legislator weighing in with his or her thoughts is suddenly a problem, “then I think we also ought to investigate the governor, because he does this kind of stuff every day.”
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Chris Graham
