Gary Robertson Archives - Virginia Business

Shoring up

Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown are all significant parts of the nation’s foundation, and historic tourism drove the region’s economy during the 20th century. But Colonial Williamsburg hasn’t been enough to keep

big crowds coming to the area consistently in the 21st century, even before the pandemic.

Visitation dropped from 960,000 in 1999 to 534,000 in 2019, officials reported, although after running at a $4.6 million deficit in 2017, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s net income improved to $87.3 million in 2020. One reason for the decline in visitor numbers is that fewer people today visit historic sites compared with earlier generations, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s former president and CEO, Mitchell B. Reiss, said in 2019 upon his retirement. He also said that Colonial Williamsburg in particular needed to update its marketing efforts to meet today’s digital culture.

“There was a time when we as a community had a notion that Colonial Williamsburg would always take care of us, that Busch Gardens would always be enough, but that’s just not the case,” Williamsburg Mayor Doug Pons says. “When I was in the hotel business, I realized that Williamsburg was seeing declining visitation. It was no secret.”

So, in 2016, Pons decided to convert his Quarterpath Inn into multifamily affordable housing.

Over time, as visitation to Williamsburg and other historic attractions (including Jamestown and Yorktown) declined, it became apparent to civic leaders that the so-called Historic Triangle needed another large investment in tourism to maintain the region’s quality of life and to keep its economy humming.

And unlike John D. Rockefeller’s rescue of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, which extended to $79 million in family support through the 1970s, “there wasn’t going to be another billionaire showing up to make that investment,” Pons says.

Using teamwork

One way the Historic Triangle region’s three localities — York and James City counties and Williamsburg — decided to invest in the area’s economic development was an indoor sports venue, which they hope also will give a boost to Busch Gardens, Colonial Williamsburg and other attractions.

In March 2022, officials formed the Historic Triangle Recreational Facilities Authority to spearhead the development of a 160,000-square-foot indoor sports complex with 12 basketball courts that can be converted into volleyball and pickleball courts. It represents the largest intergovernmental project ever undertaken by the three localities. One estimate projected the cost could be $45 million or more, but many of the final details are in flux.

In September 2022, the authority approved an interim agreement with MEB General Contractors of Chesapeake for $2.3 million to initiate the design of the core sports center complex, about 35% of the project, according to York County documents. The next decision, expected to come in the next few months, will be to choose a construction firm.

Officials have identified a preferred site for the sports complex. It would be located on underused property next to the Colonial Williamsburg Regional Visitor Center, a site that may also allow room for an adjoining performing arts center or amphitheater.

“It’s going to happen,” Pons says. “The funds to service the debt are already identified, it’s already coming in. And, there’s money in the bank to begin.”

While Pons says the visitor center will remain a hub for tourism activity, the sports complex will add a new dimension to tourism in the city and adjoining counties by attracting youth athletics and other events from around the country.

Meanwhile, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is working closely with the Historic Triangle Recreational Facilities Authority to determine the best uses for the visitor center campus, but emphasizes that the proposed sports complex will have no impact on the visitor center itself.

James City County’s economic development director, Christopher Johnson, notes that all three localities must approve funding for the indoor sports complex this year. James City’s tax revenues have been stable, offering the county some room to invest in the sports complex, Johnson says.

Although Williamsburg will likely benefit most directly from the venue if it’s sited at Colonial Williamsburg, Johnson says that in James City County, “one of our main revenue sources is hospitality and tourism, [and] the complex [also] provides additional space for activities during the week for James City citizens.”

Additionally, the county has benefited from its busy manufacturing sector, including Anheuser-Busch Inc., which saw an increase in demand during the pandemic. Also, the county is seeing more traffic from the Port of Virginia and hopes to have a shovel-ready industrial site prepared at Hazelwood Farms Enterprise Center by next spring.

Owned by SeaWorld Entertainment Inc., the Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Water Country USA theme parks are the Historic Triangle’s largest tourism draws. Photo courtesy Busch Gardens Williamsburg

New and old attractions

In addition to planning the sports complex, the three localities have also collaborated on the Edge District, a restaurant and entertainment-driven locale at the shared borders of York and James City counties and Williamsburg. Established in 2019, the Edge District offers high-end food and boutique shopping, and the resulting tax revenue from lodging and meals taxes have led to a joint fund to help finance the sports complex.

In the past two years, further cementing the spirit of regional cooperation, Williamsburg has begun including the area’s two largest employers, Colonial Williamsburg and William & Mary, in its annual State of the City events, inviting the chief executives from each to deliver addresses covering highlights from the year and future plans.

During the 2022 State of the City event, William & Mary President Katherine Rowe said that the 250th anniversary of Williamsburg in 2026 will be an important opportunity to remind the nation of the city’s role in U.S. history. “We’re going to make the case for Williamsburg’s significance as the best place in the country to understand our nation’s complex history,” she said.

Unsurprisingly, Colonial Williamsburg is also geared up for the anniversary.

“Williamsburg was host to an astonishing number of events leading up to and including 1776 that contributed to America’s founding,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation President and CEO Cliff Fleet said during his State of the City address. “Today, this history positions our region to lead the commemoration effort on behalf of our nation. The impact of this moment will rest on the preparations we make today.”

It’s also a time to focus on the largely overlooked roles of Black and Indigenous people in our history, to provide “a fuller account of the founding of the United States,” Fleet said.

In February, the 273-year-old Bray School, believed to be the oldest surviving building in America dedicated to the education of Black children, was moved from William & Mary’s campus to Colonial Williamsburg, Fleet said, where it will be fully restored by November 2024. University and Colonial Williamsburg staffers are working with the descendants of students who attended the school during the era of slavery, “so that everyone can see themselves in America’s story.”

The First Baptist Church, one of the nation’s oldest Black churches, was founded in 1776, and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is working with the congregation to uncover the church’s original site on Nassau Street, with a goal of reconstructing the building by its 250th anniversary.

Meanwhile, Rowe noted that this year will mark the 300th anniversary of the Brafferton Indian School, which educated Indigenous students over several decades and sits on W&M’s campus near the Wren Building.

“Like the Bray School, the Brafferton tricentennial offers an opportunity to provide a fuller account of the founding of the United States,” Rowe said in her State of the City remarks.

Colonial Williamsburg also has opened an interpretive Native American camp that explores regional Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the Colony of Virginia. One of Colonial Williamsburg’s major events this year will be the groundbreaking for the Colin G. and Nancy N. Campbell Archaeology Center, which will become the hub of all archaeological endeavors in the former colonial capital.

York County is looking forward to tourism income that will come from Princess Cruises making Yorktown a port of call beginning in spring 2024, county Supervisor Sheila Noll says. Photo by Mark Rhodes

Into the present

Busch Gardens Williamsburg also has ramped up its act, following the pandemic. Since 2022, the theme park has expanded its operating months to include January through March, making it a year-round attraction.

That’s been good news for the region’s hospitality industry, says Ron Kirkland, executive director of the Williamsburg Hotel & Motel Association.

The region’s hotel occupancy rate for 2022 was 50.4%, up from 45.2% in 2021 and better than 2019. Also, the average daily room rate was $148.76, “which was [an] all-time best,” Kirkland notes, compared with $125.51 in 2019.

Virginia Restaurant, Lodging and Travel Association President Eric Terry has seen some good growth in the region and believes the Historic Triangle’s larger tourism marketing budget has significantly aided its recovery.

In 2018, the General Assembly passed a special Historic Triangle tourism tax, an added 1% sales tax that helped create Visit Williamsburg, a marketing organization with an annual budget of about $15 million, Pons says. “It really changed the landscape in how we are able to promote ourselves in a broader reach. Before that, we had budgets of $2 [million] to $3 million.”

In neighboring York County, tourism is also a big draw, and Supervisor Sheila Noll says that she was energized by a February announcement that Princess Cruises will be making Yorktown a port of call in late spring 2024, opening the door to potentially thousands of new visitors coming to the region and boosting historic tourism.

The cruise ships, which can carry between 2,000 and 3,000 guests each, will land at Yorktown on the York River five times next year, and the Virginia state Senate’s budget proposal this year includes $7.5 million to build a permanent pier to accommodate the cruise ships. Currently, the river has just floating docks.

“History is very, very important to people who visit here and to people who live here,” Noll says. “We have the benefit of the past.”

Historic Triangle at a glance

James City County, York County and the city of Williamsburg make up the Historic Triangle. Located between Hampton Roads and Richmond, the area includes historical attractions, the Busch Gardens Williamsburg theme park and William & Mary, the nation’s second oldest institution of higher learning, chartered in 1693. Joint Base Langley-Eustis is a U.S. military installation formed by the 2010 merger of Langley Air Force Base and the U.S. Army’s Fort Eustis. In use since 1917, Langley is the world’s oldest continuously active Air Force base.

Population

James City County: 76,484

Williamsburg: 15,590

York County: 68,890

Top employers

William & Mary
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Sentara Healthcare
York County
Walmart Inc.
Williamsburg-James City County School Board
SeaWorld Entertainment Inc.

Major attractions

The American Revolution Museum at Yorktown tells the story of the nation’s fight for independence. Yorktown Battlefield, the site of the Revolutionary War’s final major clash, offers a visitor’s center and guided tours. Colonial Williamsburg, a popular living history attraction showcasing Colonial American life, features museums, lodging, restaurants and shops. Historic Jamestowne is the site of America’s first permanent English settlement and features an archaeological museum with 17th-century artifacts unearthed on site. Jamestown Settlement features a rebuilt interpretation of America’s first permanent settlement. The nearby Busch Gardens Williamsburg and Water Country USA theme parks are the region’s biggest tourism draws.

Top convention hotels

Williamsburg Lodge, Autograph Collection 323 rooms, 45,000 square feet of event space
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Williamsburg 295 rooms, 42,089 square feet of event space
Fort Magruder Hotel –Trademark Collection by Wyndham 303 rooms, 26,000 square feet of event space

Boutique/luxury hotels

Kingsmill Resort
Williamsburg Inn
Wedmore Place

Notable restaurants

Fat Canary, American fatcanarywilliamsburg.com
Food for Thought, American foodforthoughtrestaurant.com
La Tienda, Tapas tienda.com
Le Yaca, French leyacawilliamsburg.com
Opus 9 Steakhouse, Steakhouse opus9steakhouse.com

After the crisis

During summer 2020, racial inequities took center stage in the United States as protesters took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer was captured on video and widely disseminated via social media and news outlets.

Corporate America also responded, primarily through public statements vowing to focus on diversifying their workforces and especially C-suites, which have long been dominated by white men. Amid national grief and outrage, executives seemed open to discussions about race- and gender-related inequities in pay and promotions, as well as the whiteness of corporate boards.

Quite a few companies and other institutions hired diversity, equity and inclusion executives — some of whom were the first and only Black members of their companies’ C-suites — in 2020 and early 2021. According to LinkedIn, hiring of DEI officers increased by 84% during the 12-month period ending Aug. 30, 2020, and by 111% for the same period in 2021.

But nearly three years after Floyd’s killing, progress has stalled at some businesses and educational institutions, sometimes spilling out in public forums.

More than 88% of the 681 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies surveyed for executive search firm Crist | Kolder Associates’ Volatility Report 2022 continue to be led by white CEOs; the percentage is roughly the same for companies led by men. Additionally, a study released last year by Mogul Inc., a diversity recruitment firm, found that 69% of Fortune 500 board members are male, and 78% of Fortune 500 board members are white.

Meanwhile, DEI officers are averaging a three-year turnover rate, reports LinkedIn, and many companies do not report the demographic makeup of their workforces, making public accountability difficult or impossible to achieve.

“I see more businesses really refraining from speaking on DEI because it is no longer popular or advantageous for them. This, to me, is concerning,” says Narketta Sparkman-Key, associate provost for inclusive strategies and equity initiatives at James Madison University and formerly Old Dominion University’s director of faculty diversity and retention.

A recent CNBC report supports Sparkman- Key’s concerns about the regression of DEI initiatives.

Citing research from Glassdoor, CNBC reported that access to DEI programs nationwide surged to 39% in 2020 and peaked at 43% in 2021. In 2022, however, it dropped to 41%. “Many companies are starting to reorganize and find ways to cut costs, leaving progress toward diversity, equity and inclusion on the back burner,” a CNBC reporter concluded.

Kristen Cavallo, global CEO of MullenLowe Group and CEO of The Martin Agency, has made pay equity and inclusive hiring high priorities. Photo courtesy MullenLowe Group

Putting up walls

DEI efforts can falter for many reasons, including the current challenges with labor shortages and inflation, which makes hiring and retention more difficult.

At other workplaces, politics can interfere.

Virginia Military Institute, which came under scrutiny in 2020 following reports by The Roanoke Times and The Washington Post of racist attacks on Black cadets and alumni, hired its first Black superintendent, retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, that year. In May 2021, Wins in turn hired the institute’s first chief diversity officer, Lt. Col. Jamica N. Love, who was tasked with making VMI more welcoming to women and minorities.

However, a group of conservative, mainly white alumni have advocated for Wins’ firing, with some accusing VMI of adopting critical race theory to change the tradition-bound military academy, a claim Wins has said is “categorically false.”

The backlash — focusing on a politically tilted definition of a relatively narrow academic theory — has taken place nationwide, with conservatives opposing nearly any discussion of racism or slavery in K-12 schools and, in some cases, colleges.

CRT was a key element of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign in 2021, and in his first act as governor, he signed an executive order banning “inherently divisive concepts” from being taught in school, including that a white person is inherently racist as a result of their skin color.

Youngkin also changed the title of the state’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer position, swapping out “equity” for “opportunity.” In November 2022, former Heritage Foundation fellow Martin Brown became the third appointee to the position in less than a year, after the first appointee, Angela Sailor, left because of a family matter. Subsequent hire Rosa Atkins departed quietly last fall and took a job as interim superintendent of a North Carolina school system.

The atmosphere and the job were quite different in 2019, when then-Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, named Janice Underwood as Virginia’s — and the nation’s — first state Cabinet-level chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer.

In a 2021 interview with Virginia Business, Underwood recalled that Northam’s administration approached her while Northam was under fire for a blackface photo appearing in his medical yearbook, a discovery made in February 2019. After weathering calls for his resignation, Northam said he wanted to improve diversity among state employees and vendors, a job he handed to Underwood, who said in 2021 that she took the job because she had “a plan to interrupt racial oppression, as opposed to just [being] the window dressing.”

In 2022, she became the federal government’s chief diversity officer, after President Joe Biden created the Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council, convened by the Office of Personnel Management. She joined the Biden administration as director of the diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility office, leading efforts to increase diversity and equity within the federal government.

Today, Underwood says that society has always experienced ebbs and flows in its commitment to diversity and inclusion. It can be hard to change the culture of a workplace, she says, especially after only a year or two.

Racial equity commitments take on urgency in the middle of crises — such as the national racial justice protests of 2020 or Northam’s political catastrophe — but, she notes, “then when we get away from a crisis, there’s somewhat of a malaise.”

The business case

Politics and inertia aside, Underwood and many other equity-focused executives say there’s a strong business case for diversity, equity and inclusion.

In 2021, Virginia became the first state to win the top slot in CNBC’s prestigious Top State for Business rankings two years in a row. The state government’s focus on ending inequities was cited as a reason for Virginia’s second consecutive win. The General Assembly passed a bill requiring all state agencies to develop DEI plans, and the Virginia Values Act expanded antidiscrimination laws to include LGBTQ residents, making Virginia the first state in the South to do so.

“We found that businesses wanted to come to Virginia because of our diversity, equity [and] inclusion strategy,” Underwood says. “The major Fortune 500 … [and] Fortune 100 companies that were coming into Virginia were meeting with me, and they were very excited about our diversity strategy. They told me their employees would want to move to Virginia to work and raise a family because of the inclusive nature that Virginia was moving toward.”

At Richmond-based The Martin Agency, one of Kristen Cavallo’s first actions as CEO was to double the number of women on the advertising firm’s executive committee to achieve the gender balance she was seeking. Like the Northam administration and Underwood, Martin was in rough waters when Cavallo was hired in 2017 just weeks after an internal investigation into an allegation of sexual harassment concluded. The agency’s chief creative officer left, although he denied wrongdoing.

Cavallo started making big changes, including promoting Carmina Drummond as chief culture officer. Pay equity became a higher priority, especially increasing pay for women and all people of color, and since 2018, the percentage of people of color at the agency has doubled from 14% to 28%.

“I have been a long-term believer in the benefits of diversity,” Cavallo says. “Research has shown that a diverse leadership team has higher margins, higher revenue, higher employee participation, higher morale. And that, ultimately, as a CEO of a publicly held company, is what I am judged by.”

In November 2022, Cavallo was promoted to global CEO of MullenLowe Group, in which she will lead 13 companies while remaining CEO of Martin.

Cavallo says she draws “a red line” from the agency’s commitment to a diverse leadership team to its business successes, including campaigns for Geico General Insurance Co., Old Navy, UPS and Walmart Inc. Martin won Adweek’s Agency of the Year award twice, in 2020 and 2021, and grew its revenue during the pandemic, at a time when many firms were losing income.

‘Best decision’

Drummond says Cavallo was committed to diversity and an inclusive culture from the beginning — proactively so. “She realized that for a company to be creative, it needed different voices and different lenses. When she came in, she said she wasn’t an incrementalist, and that she was going to make changes and do it fast.”

Cavallo says there is plenty of research that shows adopting the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion can make a business stronger and more profitable.

For instance, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. released a study in 2019 finding that companies in the top quartiles for gender diversity among its executives were 25% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile. Similarly, McKinsey found that the top 25% of companies with an ethnically and culturally diverse leadership were 36% more likely to report above-average profits than the companies with the least executive diversity.

“The research is so clear and so available,” Cavallo says, “that I’m continually surprised that the majority of CEOs, especially those of publicly held companies, don’t adhere to these practices.”

Sparkman-Key, who worked to increase the number of minority faculty members at ODU, is now part of a similar effort at JMU as associate provost for DEI in the school’s academic affairs division.

“I think there is a need for public action related to DEI — action focused on increasing diversity and inclusion in the talent pipeline,” Sparkman-Key says. Specific pathways need to be created for underrepresented populations to work within various businesses, she says, as well as a need for succession planning that is focused on the inclusion and promotion of underrepresented populations.

For its part, JMU — whose student body is 75% white and only 4% Black — recently hired Malika Carter-Hoyt as its inaugural vice president of DEI and chief diversity officer. The university also has created a working group to improve conditions for teaching faculty, particularly focused on making minority faculty feel more accepted and welcomed, which can lead to improved retention. In 2020, JMU’s full-time faculty was 80% white and only 3.6% Black, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.

This fall, Sparkman-Key plans to roll out the “Inclusive JMU” initiative, featuring speakers and interventions to guide the university toward what she calls “inclusion and the welcoming of all voices and experiences in our community.”

As for the business community, Cavallo says The Martin Agency is proof that a company can become more financially successful while also increasing diversity.

“There is a statistical correlation between revenue uplift and investment in diversity, and it’s 100% in the control of the CEO,” says Cavallo. “It’s not only morally correct, it’s the best business decision you can make.”

Class conflicts

Makena Massarella, a 20-year-old junior at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, is well on her way to becoming part of the solution to one of the most vexing problems facing Virginia and the nation: the shortage of teachers.

She wants to be an elementary school teacher, the most in-demand position out of 10 critical shortages of teaching positions in Virginia’s schools, according to a June report from the state Department of Education. Special education teachers come in second as most needed, followed by middle school teachers.

The state’s 132 school divisions employed 100,967 full-time teachers as of October 2020, according to the DOE. And state education leaders and the Virginia Education Association estimate there are more than 1,000 teacher vacancies in Virginia, a fluctuating number that’s expected to grow.

The reasons for the teacher shortage vary. Many longtime teachers have reached retirement age, and others have left public education for more lucrative fields, an effect of low unemployment and a strong hiring market.

Political and pandemic pressures also have taken a toll on teacher morale. School boards and classrooms in Virginia have been roiling over disputes, including wearing masks, removing controversial books and guidance issued by the DOE this year requiring parental permission for teachers to use a different name or pronouns for K-12 students in Virginia. Backed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the policy has sparked strong emotions, as opponents say it unfairly targets transgender students, especially those whose parents are not supportive. Proponents, including Youngkin, say that the policy allows parents to have more say over their children’s education and life at school. Youngkin also set up an email tip line encouraging parents and students to report school employees engaging in “inherently divisive practices.” The tip line, which received national media coverage and was the subject of much criticism, was shut down in September.

Lisa Jaffe-Wilfong is a kindergarten
aide in Frederick County who is pursuing teacher certification through JMU’s Grow Your Own program. Photo by Norm Shafer

James Fedderman, president of the Virginia Education Association teachers’ union, which has more than 40,000 members, warns that politics has soured the profession for many teachers who were already working a difficult and demanding job. “It’s just a totally divisive environment where our elected officials are trying to pit parents and teachers against each other,” he says.

To address teaching shortages, some states have lowered qualifications for teachers, and others are recruiting teachers from other countries. Here in Virginia, for example, Fairfax County is considering forging a partnership with the Barbados Ministry of Education.

JMU is partnering with the Virginia Community College System on a new pilot program, Grow Your Own, that covers tuition, fees, books, and room and board for college students fresh out of high school in exchange for teaching two years at the low-income school districts they hail from.

It’s part of a larger effort to encourage more people to become teachers and return to their home communities. The pilot program also has pathways for current college students, like Massarella, as well as teachers’ aides and paraprofessionals.

“I always wanted to be a teacher — or thought I did,” Massarella says. To test her interest in becoming a teacher, she joined a teaching club at her high school in Elkton, a rural Rockingham County community of fewer than 3,000 residents. Yearlong visits to a local elementary school classroom solidified Massarella’s decision to become a teacher.

“I loved it,” she says.

Planting seeds

This year, the General Assembly allocated $4.2 million to JMU’s Grow Your Own pilot program, which will place teachers in Frederick, Loudoun, Rockingham and Warren counties, as well as Harrisonburg, Petersburg and Portsmouth.

“Grow your own” is a generic term used in education circles around the country to describe similar initiatives.

Fedderman calls the program a “phenomenal resource” for identifying people who are interested in teaching and “to authentically and organically grow [an] educator who works best for the students.”

Students in the Grow Your Own program must pursue one of the three teacher licensure areas in highest demand in school systems: special education, early childhood education and elementary education. If students fail to meet their two-year teaching obligation, they must repay the money they received through the program as a loan.

It’s not just current college students who are part of Grow Your Own. Also taking part are some people who already work in schools — just not as full-time teachers.

Lisa Jaffe-Wilfong taught preschool and later became a kindergarten aide in Frederick County. Last spring, she learned about Grow Your Own and was thrilled to learn that it included a pathway for paraprofessionals like herself to become teachers. “I thought, ‘This is a sign. I’m going to do it,” she says.

Her cohort of Grow Your Own students includes a 72-year-old who decided to re-enter the work world, a former horse trainer and others from different walks of life.

“We all decided to give it a go,” Jaffe-Wilfong says.

While continuing to work full time as a kindergarten aide at Middletown Elementary School, Jaffe-Wilfong also takes online classes from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. once a week.

The program pays her tuition, and she hopes to receive money for her textbooks as she moves through the program, but she’s not quite sure if that will happen. (Program benefits for paraprofessionals vary from the benefits for high school students who are recruited to become teachers, and they can also vary for Grow Your Own students who were already enrolled at JMU, such as Massarella.)

“Sometimes I’ll be saying, ‘I’m 53, what am I doing?’ But then, why not? Why not?” Jaffe-Wilfong asks emphatically.

L to R: Robert Jordan, a special education teacher at Lacey Spring Elementary School; Larry Shifflett, assistant superintendent of innovation and learning for Rockingham County; and Maria Taylor, special education teacher at John C. Myers Elementary School. Jordan and Taylor were certified to teach through a program in Rockingham. Photo by Norm Shafer

‘Immediate impact’

JMU officials are hopeful that if the Grow Your Own program proves successful, the legislature might renew — and perhaps increase — its funding, as well as provide funding for other nontraditional initiatives to recruit teachers. JMU officials are still working out possibilities for other initiatives and what an expansion of Grow Your Own might look like.

“JMU plans on working with other universities, talking about expanding [Grow Your Own],” says Mark L’Esperance, dean of JMU’s College of Education. “I believe it is something that has the potential to be replicated in situations across the state.”

Additional funding likely would permit JMU to expand its current program for recent high school graduates and paraprofessionals.

Currently, about 75 paraprofessionals and 12 full-time JMU students are enrolled in the program. Joy Myers, executive director of the program, says 25 spots for university students were approved, but there was only six weeks between the time JMU received funding from the state in June and when classes started in August.

“Now we’ll be able to roll over some of the money for next year,” Myers says.

“We appreciate Gov. Youngkin and the money he approved for the Grow Your Own program. It’s apolitical. It was a bipartisan budget that approved this,” L’Esperance says, describing the program as a three-legged stool, one leg of which is focused largely on JMU freshmen who want to enter the teaching profession.

“We want students in low-wealth school divisions to say, ‘You know what? Teaching is a noble profession [and] I want to become a teacher and I want to go back and serve my community.’”

Grow Your Own’s second leg is focused on paraprofessionals already working in school systems — people who have an associate degree or perhaps no college credits. Under the program, this cohort might attend a community college partnering with JMU or work online independently under JMU’s guidance and take courses that can lead to a teaching license.

JMU officials already have been working with several community colleges who are under the umbrella of the Grow Your Own effort.

But it’s Grow Your Own’s federally funded third leg that most excites L’Esperance.

“We’re working with several school divisions right now on it,” he says. “If you have a bachelor’s degree and are a paraprofessional, instead of coming to the university and getting college credit, we’re coming out to you. We’re working with the school divisions so that over a two- or three-year period, you can be certified as a teacher. That’s a game changer for this state.”

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine helped secure $620,000 to pay for 167 program slots for paraprofessionals with bachelor’s degrees.

“This will have an immediate impact on the teacher shortage,” says L’Esperance, adding that the program will put teachers in classrooms within the first year, giving them three years to get fully licensed.

Accelerated teacher training

L’Esperance brought the idea for Grow Your Own from his previous experience in North Carolina, and a team at JMU refined how it might work in Virginia.

The concept, Myers explains, was to devise a program that would serve school divisions that had “a lot of diversity and low wealth” and often have a harder time attracting teachers than wealthier divisions.

Additionally, she says, “we wanted to be sure the money got into the hands of people who really need the opportunity, who couldn’t go to college and pursue their dream without that money.”

Larry Shifflett, Rockingham County’s assistant superintendent for innovation and learning, says his school system, like JMU, realized early on that teaching aides and other paraprofessionals could be part of the pipeline for new teachers if they received training and support.

“Our first attempt at this was in the summer of 2019,” Shifflett says, noting that Rockingham’s paraprofessional program preceded JMU’s efforts.

Working with JMU and the state Department of Education, along with county funding of about $150,000 over three years, the Rockingham school system created a cohort of 10 paraprofessional teaching candidates. “And we ended up hiring seven of those folks in 2021,” Shifflett says.

Now, working with JMU and Blue Ridge Community College, Rockingham has 23 paraprofessionals enrolled in the Grow Your Own program.

Grow Your Own builds on the success of other JMU programs such as its Accelerated Teacher Training Program, which targets career changers who want to become high school teachers and earn a master’s degree along the way.

Katie Dredger, an associate professor who oversees JMU’s Accelerated Teacher Training Program, says the pandemic caused many people to consider changing careers, including some who were inspired to pursue teaching. A hand surgeon, an administrative assistant at a financial firm and a lab worker are among the career changers who have enrolled in JMU’s program, Dredger says.

The three-semester graduate licensure program, which was launched in 2020, has produced 18 new teachers since 2021, and an additional 13 are in the pipeline to graduate in 2023.

By earning a master’s degree, newly minted teachers earn a pay boost when they begin teaching. Also, “they are more likely to stay in teaching if they have a greater range of experience in coursework” that comes with a master’s degree, Dredger says.

Although the students in the Accelerated Teacher Training Program pay tuition, some can get help from scholarships and other assistance, Dredger says.

For JMU’s part, just as it has since 1908, L’Esperance says, the university remains laser-focused on providing the commonwealth with trained teachers — a mission that’s more critical than ever.

Innovative programs like Grow Your Own and the Accelerated Teacher Training Program are part of the answer to the teacher shortage, L’Esperance says, but they aren’t the only fixes. “My colleagues across the state are all trying to come up with solutions.”

JMU at a glance

Founded

Established in 1908, James Madison University was originally known as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women. It was renamed Madison College in 1938 in honor of President James Madison and became James Madison University in 1977.

Campus

Located in Harrisonburg in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, JMU’s 728-acre campus is divided by Interstate 81. It’s known for its distinctive bluestone buildings on the campus’ west side, as well as Newman Lake near Greek Row and the university’s 125-acre Edith J. Carrier Arboretum, which has numerous gardens and wooded areas with 100-plus-year-old oak and hickory trees.

Enrollment^*

Undergraduate students: 20,346

Graduate students: 1,878

Student profile

Male | female ratio: 41% | 59%

International students: 1%

Minority students: 22%

Academic programs

JMU has nearly 140 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, ranging from accounting and computer science to international business, psychology and nursing, and eight doctoral programs.

Faculty^*

Full-time instructional
faculty: 1,070

Part-time instructional
faculty: 393

Tuition, fees, housing and dining

$24,816 approximate annual in-state undergraduate residential cost, including tuition, mandatory fees, housing and meal plan for incoming freshmen.

* Fall 2022

Upward mobility

Last year, when Old Dominion University was searching for its new president, the executive search firm contracted by the university also provided a bit of business intelligence about how the university of 24,000 students in Norfolk was viewed nationally.

“Old Dominion University was seen as a university on the rise,” says ODU’s rector, Bruce Bradley, former president and publisher of The Virginian-Pilot newspaper and retired president of Landmark Publishing Group.

That pretty well describes the steady upward transformation that Bradley says he’s observed at ODU during the past few decades.

The university, he says, has gone from being perceived as “an adequate commuter college” to becoming a recognized research and residential university with ambitions to make a larger impact, perhaps on the national stage.

“It’s gotten up a head of steam,” says Bradley, who first came to the Hampton Roads region in 1971 when he began serving in the U.S. Navy.

Founded in 1930 as the Norfolk division of William & Mary and Virginia Tech, ODU became an independent institution in 1962 and achieved university status in 1969.

Bradley says ODU’s 2021 designation as an R1 research university (recognizing it under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a doctoral university with a great amount of research activity) was huge.

The R1 designation creates a pathway to recruiting high-quality faculty and students, obtaining large research grants, and attracting industry and government agency partners, the university says.

Equally as significant to ODU’s future are the ongoing efforts by ODU, Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and Norfolk State University to create the ONE School of Public Health, with support from Sentara Healthcare. There has also been talk about a potential merger of EVMS and ODU.

“If you look at the public health metrics for Hampton Roads, we tend to score near the bottom on every key category,” Bradley says. “So, the thought is, one of the ways we can address the health inequities in this community is [by] combining these two organizations [ODU and EVMS] and funding it more aggressively through Sentara, which has been a willing partner, as well as the [state government].”

ODU also is focused on graduating students who will enter the health care profession and work to create better health outcomes in Hampton Roads. The university says it’s second in the state only to Virginia Tech in producing STEM-H (science, technology, engineering, math and health sciences) graduates — accounting for about 40% of all ODU graduates.

And it wants to produce even more, aiming for growth among students from underrepresented communities and those who are the first in their families to attend college.

This fall, ODU plans to launch the largest fundraising campaign in its history, says President Brian Hemphill. Photo by Mark Rhodes

Increasing opportunity

ODU, which estimates it has an annual economic impact of about $2.6 billion, also has evolved into one of the commonwealth’s leading institutions for social mobility.

President Brian Hemphill, who became ODU’s first Black president on July 1, 2021, has walked that road himself.

“For me, it was growing up in eastern North Carolina the son of a brick mason, [my] mother a seamstress, and having the opportunity to grow up in humble beginnings on a farm and understanding the importance of hard work,” he says.

Hemphill’s parents worked hard so that he and his seven siblings could go to college, he says. “There was a sense of responsibility to go out and do the best I could every single day.”

Since then, Hemphill has been a strong advocate for increased educational and economic access and opportunity.

“About 28% of our students are African American, and about 49% of our students are from diverse populations or backgrounds,” he says. “We’re one of the few campuses that have a center for social mobility. It is really looking at the opportunity for engaging students and positioning them for success — with services and support, as well as some of their financial needs.”

Formerly president of Radford University, Hemphill notes that 38.1% of ODU’s fall 2020 undergraduates received federal Pell grants, which assist low-income students. That’s compared with an average 26.1% for all of Virginia’s public four-year institutions.

Additionally, last year, the university reported that roughly half of ODU’s incoming freshmen and 25% of its graduating class were first-generation college students.

“That’s an important niche for us to continue to focus on,” says Bradley, ODU’s rector, adding that the success of first-generation students is crucial to the futures of ODU and the region.

During the 2010s, the number of African American students at ODU increased 34% (from 5,211 to 6,846) and the number of Hispanic students jumped 73% (from 1,204 to 2,088), according to data from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).

Additionally, approximately 25% of the university’s enrollment consists of distance learners, and ODU has conferred more than 20,000 degrees to online students. Hemphill wants to grow that remote-study enrollment because, he says, the university faces space constraints for in-person lessons on its 337-acre waterfront campus.

ODU’s online degree program began by serving Navy personnel around the world, then through a satellite learning system in partnership with Virginia community colleges before maturing into today’s web-based studies.

Workforce development remains an overarching focus for ODU’s efforts in distance learning and face-to-face instruction, providing employers with assistance to sustain and grow their companies and Virginia’s economy, Hemphill says.

To that end, in June ODU announced plans to create a School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations, acknowledging the region’s historic roots in the maritime industry and its juxtaposition to the Port of Virginia and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval station.

ODU has an established record of leader- ship and collaboration with the maritime industry, Hemphill says, adding that industry partners have asked the university to increase its work in the space.

The university is also increasing its research in coastal resilience and offshore wind, coinciding with timely factors such as sea-level rise and Dominion Energy Inc.’s planned $9.8 billion wind farm in waters 27 miles off the coast of nearby Virginia Beach.

And in September, during his State of the University address, Hemphill announced that ODU plans to launch a School of Data Science in partnership with the Jefferson Lab (Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility) and NASA Langley Research Center, both of which will receive faculty status for researchers. ODU faculty and students in turn would receive access to the national labs’ facilities and have opportunities for research collaborations.

In July, the ODU Monarchs joined the Sun Belt Conference, widening the school’s exposure to ESPN audiences and reducing travel time to away games. Photos courtesy Old Dominion University

‘The front porch’

ODU has been taking its “on the rise” reputation literally in recent years, making and planning a series of major additions to its physical footprint.

Last year, the university opened its new $75 million chemistry and biochemistry building, which features the 122-seat Michael and Kimthanh Lé Digital Theater and Planetarium, as well as 24 research laboratories and 13 teaching labs.

Also in 2021, the university opened a $62 million residence hall, providing housing for up to 470 students in an environment designed to be a living-learning community for cybersecurity, gaming, health professions and engineering students.

In summer 2023, ODU plans to complete work on its $75 million, three-story Health Sciences Building. Housing the School of Dental Hygiene, the School of Rehabilitation Sciences and the School of Medical Diagnostic and Translational Sciences, the building also will function as a focal point for university community health care initiatives.

During the 2022 General Assembly session, ODU secured $188 million for a new, five-story, 160,000-plus-square-foot Biology Building that’s slated to replace the university’s Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building by 2026.

On the athletics side, in July ODU joined the Sun Belt Conference, which will widen the school’s exposure to ESPN audiences, while roughly halving travel time to away games.

“It’s a great move for our student athletes and fan base,” Hemphill says. “Our fan base is excited to be able to compete against the likes of James Madison, Marshall, Coastal Carolina and Appalachian State.”

Wood Selig, ODU’s director of athletics, says the Sun Belt’s 10-year contract with ESPN was a “game-changer” because of the exposure it will give ODU and its conference rivals, and the access it will provide to ODU fans to follow their favorite teams. Last year, the conference signed a media rights deal with ESPN that will see a 50% increase on Sun Belt football games aired across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU.

Additionally, ODU, which completed a $67.5 million makeover of its S.B. Ballard football stadium in 2019, announced in September that it had received a $2.5 million donation from Dennis and Jan Ellmer toward the $20 million renovation and expansion of the school’s baseball stadium. Dennis Ellmer is president and CEO of Chesapeake-based Priority Auto Group Inc., a dealership with locations in Hampton Roads, Roanoke and Northern Virginia. Planned in stages, the baseball stadium makeover will include expanded and upgraded seating, luxury suites, a club area, new locker and meeting rooms, and a new press box.

“In many ways, athletics can be the front porch of an institution; it’s certainly a part of the branding and mission,” Selig says. “A well-run athletic program can generate national notoriety, which can help with enrollment growth, out-of-state enrollment interest and elevate the overall brand and perception of the institution in the eye of the public in a very significant and meaningful way.”

And at least one former ODU athlete has elevated the university’s profile as an ambassador in a different realm: poetry.

Last year, ODU alumna Natalie Diaz, who was a point guard and captain of the women’s basketball team, became the first Latina and Native American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. A 2000 ODU graduate, she received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” fellowship in 2018 before going on to win the 2021 Pulitzer for “Postcolonial Love Poem,” her collection of what the Pulitzer jury described as “heart-wrenching and defiant poems that explore what it means to love and be loved in an America beset by conflict.”

The next stage for ODU as it seeks to reach wider notice could come this fall when the university will announce what Hemphill says will be the largest fundraising campaign in ODU’s history.

“There are a lot of things I’m proud of, and it starts with our faculty, our staff and our students,” Hemphill says. “They are the drivers behind the growth and momentum of this great institution.”

ODU at a glance

Founded

Old Dominion University was founded in 1930 as a two-year school to train teachers and engineers as an extension of William & Mary and Virginia Tech.
It gained independence in 1962 as Old Dominion College and began offering master’s degrees in 1964 and doctoral degrees in 1971. It was renamed
Old Dominion University in 1969.

Campus

Old Dominion has seven academic colleges and three schools. Its 337-acre Norfolk campus is bordered on two sides by the Elizabeth and Lafayette rivers. The school also operates regional higher educational centers in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Hampton.

Enrollment¹

Undergraduate: 18,363
Graduate: 4,656
In-state: 20,178
International: 717
Students of color: 11,590²

Employees: 2,474

Faculty: 915 full-time

Tuition and fees

In-state tuition and fees: $11,630
Tuition and fees (out of state): $31,580
Room and board: $14,116
Average financial aid awarded to full-time freshmen seeking assistance: $15,987

¹ Fall 2022 enrollment statistics
² 2021-22 data

Stairway to heaven

Nationally, CEO pay in 2021 reached historic highs for the second year in a row, and Virginia was no exception to this trend.

The CEOs of Virginia’s largest publicly traded companies were rewarded handsomely last year, with CEO compensation rising 4.9% year-over-year to an average $8.467 million compensation package, compared with $8.068 million in 2020.

CEO compensation data was gleaned from an annual study conducted by Equilar Inc., a California-based corporate leadership data firm. To determine executive pay, Equilar tallies salary, bonus, perks, stock awards, stock option awards, long-term awards and other compensation. Altogether, Equilar examined CEO compensation data for 56 Virginia-based public companies with annual revenues of $1 billion or more. (See data for the top 40 highest-paid Virginia CEOs of publicly traded companies at bottom of this story.)

Virginia’s most highly compensated CEO in 2021 was Michael J. Salvino of DXC Technology Co. in Ashburn, a Fortune 500 information technology services and consulting company. His pay totaled $28.716 million, a 32% jump over 2020, when he earned $21.733 million.

That compensation bump doesn’t necessarily correlate with the company’s financial performance, however. DXC posted $16.265 billion in 2022 revenue, down 8.26% from 2021, when it reported $17.729 billion. That, in turn, was 9.44% less than the $19.577 billion DXC reported in 2020. The company’s stock was trading at $26.60 in early September, down from a high of $96.75 per share in 2018.

DXC declined comment for this story. Salvino, who is also DXC’s chairman and president, has told investors that DXC has been going through a multiyear “transformation journey” to become better focused and more cost-effective. In earnings calls this year, the company said it missed some revenue goals after encountering unexpected costs and other disruptions associated with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted DXC to withdraw business from Russia.

In August, the company posted first quarter 2023 earnings of $3.71 billion, down 10.5% from the same period a year ago. “Our transformation journey is creating value and we are confident that we are taking the right steps for DXC in the short term that will set us up for success in the long term,” Salvino said in a statement at the time.

DXC Technology Chairman, President and CEO Mike Salvino was the highest-paid leader of a Virginia publicly traded company in 2021. The Fortune 500 tech executive earned $28.7 million last year, up from $21.7 million in 2020. Photo courtesy DXC Technology Co. — DXC Technology Chairman, President and CEO Mike Salvino was the highest-paid leader of a Virginia publicly traded company in 2021. The Fortune 500 tech executive earned
$28.7 million last year, up from $21.7 million in 2020. Photo courtesy DXC Technology Co.

Coming in second place for total compensation among Virginia CEOs of public companies was General Dynamics Corp. Chairman and CEO Phebe N. Novakovic, who received $23,553,862 in total compensation in 2021 for leading the Reston-based Fortune 500 global aerospace and defense contractor. That represented a 24% boost over her 2020 pay of $18.946 million.

General Dynamics reported $38.5 billion in 2021 revenue, up from $37.9 billion in 2020, but down from the $39.4 billion it reaped in 2019. The company’s stock hit a five-year high of $254.99 per share in March, when its General Dynamics Information Technology Inc. subsidiary won a $4.5 billion, 10-year National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency contract. General Dynamics stock was trading at $227.69 in early September.

In 2019, General Dynamics won the largest Navy contract ever awarded, a $22.2 billion multiyear order for nine Block V Virginia-class nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarines capable of launching Tomahawk missiles. That was followed by an additional $2.4 billion award in March 2021 to build a 10th Block V submarine. Construction of that submarine is expected to begin in 2024.

Coming in third place on the compensation scale was Christopher J. Nassetta, president and CEO of McLean-based international hospitality company Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. His overall compensation was $23.285 million, a 16% increase over his 2020 compensation of $20.058 million.

Like almost every other hospitality business, Hilton was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and its business still hasn’t rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. For 2020 and 2021, it took in $4.307 billion and $5.788 billion in revenue respectively, well below the $9.452 billion it posted in 2019. But this summer, Nassetta said in an earnings call that, based on increased travel demand during the first half of this year, he predicted that business travel will be back “on a revenue basis equal to 2019 levels” by late 2022.

Nationally, the median pay for CEOs was $14.5 million in 2021 — a 17.1% increase from the $12.7 million media from the previous year, according to an analysis by Equilar and The Associated Press of compensation for CEOs leading S&P 500 companies for at least two years at the close of fiscal year 2021.

The highest paid U.S. CEO identified in the most recent Equilar/AP executive compensation survey was Peter Kern of Redmond, Washington-based online travel company Expedia Group Inc. Kern received $296.2 million in 2021. The only other S&P CEO to earn more than $200 million last year was David M. Zaslav of New York-based entertainment conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., with a $246.6 million pay package.

Virginia CEOs — even the most highly compensated — are paupers by comparison.

General Dynamics Corp. Chairman and CEO Phebe N. Novakovic was the second highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company last year. In 2021, Novakovic earned $23.55 million for leading the Reston-based Fortune 500 aerospace and defense contractor. Photo courtesy General Dynamics Corp.

Bonus babies

In Virginia’s CEO pay horse race for 2021, the biggest drop in salary was suffered by Timothy O’Shaughnessy of Arlington-based Graham Holdings Co., a diversified conglomerate that formerly owned The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine. His total compensation dropped 77% in 2021 to $2.252 million, down from $9.633 million in 2020.

In terms of percentage gain in compensation, the biggest winner among Virginia CEOs was Michael J. Saylor of MicroStrategy Inc., a Tysons-based software firm best known as the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin. In 2021, Saylor saw his compensation go up 583% to $2.78 million, up from $407,160 in 2020.

But big winners don’t always stay that way.

In August, Saylor stepped down as MicroStrategy’s CEO, transitioning to executive chairman, amid an earnings report that tallied a $1.98 billion impairment loss on the company’s bitcoin holdings. Additionally, Washington, D.C.’s city government sued Saylor and MicroStrategy in August, alleging that Saylor and the company had engaged in a tax avoidance scheme, falsely claiming that Saylor was a resident of Virginia or Florida when his primary residence was in D.C. Saylor and MicroStrategy vigorously denied the allegations. (See related story.)

For the average Virginia CEO, Equilar’s study finds that bonuses are an important component of executive pay, accounting for about 20% of most CEO’s compensation packages. Overall, Virginia CEOs also saw increases in their 2021 bonus pay, which rose 35.9% over 2020, averaging $1.725 million in 2021, up from $1.373 million for the previous year.

Last year “was a good year, financially, for a lot of companies,” says Equilar’s director of research, Courtney Yu, explaining why bonuses and overall compensation rose significantly in 2021.

Novakovic of General Dynamics earned the biggest bonus among Virginia CEOs of publicly traded companies, reaping $6.074 million, an 111% bump over her 2020 bonus of $2.872 million.

The Virginia CEO who saw the largest percentage gain in their bonus pay last year was George Holm of Goochland County-based food distribution company Performance Food Group Co. His bonus pay rose 389% in 2021 to $1.8 million, up from $375,000 in 2020. Performance Food Group had furloughed or laid off thousands of workers and deferred 25% of its senior management’s compensation in 2020 as food orders from restaurants plummeted amid the early months of the pandemic. PFG reorganized its business segments this year to streamline operations.

Just behind Holm was Norfolk Southern Corp. CEO James A. Squires, who is on the list of Virginia CEOs for the last time this year after the railroad company formally finished moving its headquarters from Norfolk to Atlanta in late 2021. His bonus rose from $779,625 in 2020 to a far more robust $3.465 million in 2021, a percentage gain of 344%. His bonus significantly exceeded his base salary of $1 million.

Vested interest

But neither bonuses nor salaries are the biggest driver behind a CEO’s compensation, according to Yu of Equilar. Equity compensation, which can include shares, stock options or other ownership stake in a company, constitutes the largest portion of CEO compensation these days, which is a continuing trend, he says.

“Investors have always wanted [CEO] pay to be more closely aligned with performance, and when we measure performance, we’re talking about a company’s stock price usually,” Yu says.

The more equity executives are granted, the more their compensation is tied to the company’s stock performance, which is ultimately what investors care about, he says.

As a rule, CEOs can’t cash in on their equity immediately.

“There is a vesting component to it, usually three or four years,” Yu says, so equity grants function not only as an incentive for remaining in the job, but also for continuing to perform well over the long term.

The average equity award in 2021 was $5.5 million, more than twice the average $2.6 million that CEOs received from salaries and bonuses.

The largest equity awards made to a CEO in 2021 were to Salvino of DXC Technology. His equity awards totaled $25.087 million in 2021, constituting most of his $28.7 million compensation package.

Novakovic of General Dynamics, second on the compensation list, had equity awards totaling $15.395 million, making up more than 65% of her overall compensation of $23.5 million.

Christopher Nassetta of Hilton Worldwide Holdings received an equity award of $18.274 million against total compensation of $23.285 million.

Also notable in the Equilar survey is that women CEOs are sparsely represented among the top-paid Virginia CEOs, with only three women among the 56 Virginia CEOs whose compensation was studied. That’s just over 5% — considerably less than the 14.79% of women CEOs heading up Fortune 500 companies this year.

Besides Novakovic of General Dynamics, the other two top-paid women CEOS of publicly traded Fortune 500 Virginia companies are Nazzic S. Keene of Reston-based federal contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) and Kathy J. Warden of Falls Church-based aerospace and defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp.

While few in number, Virginia’s women CEOs all had a high batting average when it came to compensation.

Novakovic bested all but one of the male CEOs and all of her female counterparts. Meanwhile, Warden with Northrop Grumman posted total compensation of $19.505 million in 2021, putting her among the top 10 highest-paid Virginia CEOs of public companies, despite seeing her compensation drop slightly from $19.662 million in 2020. And Keene with SAIC received compensation of $8.343 million, a 20% boost over her 2020 pay of $6.936 million.

The highest-paid U.S. woman CEO in 2021, according to Equilar, was Roz Brewer, who last year became CEO of Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., which owns the Walgreens pharmacy retail chain. Brewer last year received $28.3 million in compensation — $20.2 million of which came from equity awards.

Nancy Bagranoff, a professor of accounting and former dean of the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business, says there are a lot of reasons why women aren’t becoming CEOs in the same numbers as men.

“But the main one is that we nominate and promote who we know. And, unfortunately, that means the same guys who meet on the golf course or in the locker room or in a bar or get-together,” says Bagranoff, who also was dean of Old Dominion University’s College of Business and Public Administration. “They don’t mean to exclude the women, but they don’t know them in the same way.”

Companies, she says, need more women at the top.

“It’s diversity and decision-making that leads to better performance,” Bagranoff says. “Having everybody the same … does not work. Women bring something different to the table, and having those differences are really important.”

Wealth gap

Overall, many Virginia CEOs saw their base salaries increase in 2021, although most rose by single-digit percentages.

There were exceptions, of course.

The executive who saw the biggest percentage increase in base salary was Hilton’s Nassetta, whose base salary increased by 259%, to $1.255 million in 2021, compared with $350,000 the year before, when Nassetta announced in April 2020 he would forgo his base salary for the rest of the year due to the economic impact of the pandemic.

Capital One Financial Corp. founder, Chairman and CEO Richard D. Fairbank earned no salary in 2021, but that’s in keeping with his long-term practice of being paid primarily in company stock. In 2021, Fairbank received an equity award of $15.817 million and a hefty $4.55 million bonus — the second largest bonus of any Virginia CEO. That’s up from the $3 million bonus he received in 2020 for heading up the McLean-based credit card and banking company.

The ratio of CEO pay to the median pay of employees has been watched more closely in recent years, amid concerns about the widening wealth gap. (At the beginning of 2022, the top 1% of U.S. households controlled about 32% of the nation’s wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of U.S. households collectively held 2.6% of the country’s wealth.)

Among the Virginia publicly traded companies with the highest paid top executives, median employee pay rose 0.8% from 2020 to 2021, while average CEO pay increased by about 5% during the same period, according to Equilar.

The CEO-employee pay ratio varies widely in Virginia. The lowest disparity between CEO pay and worker pay last year was at Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.), where the median worker pay was $154,483 and CEO Michael DeVito’s compensation totaled $443,032.

The highest CEO-worker pay gulf was at Richmond-based leaf tobacco supplier Universal Corp., where CEO George Freeman made $3.67 million last year, and the median worker pay was $1,928. (Universal’s workforce is largely composed of seasonal part-time laborers, many in developing countries.)

Yu of Equilar notes that the differences between CEO and employee compensation are inextricably tied to the types of industries being surveyed.

At retail companies, for example, Yu says, “you’re going to see lower median compensation, compared to those in the technology space.”

Nationally, CEOs of the 100 top-earning U.S. companies brought home 254 times more than the average worker in 2021, according to Equilar.

Click On Image For Larger View

Work it out

The Virginia Community College System is experiencing what one top official describes as a “tectonic shift.”

Although transfer programs to four-year colleges still account for the largest enrollment demand in community colleges, fewer students are interested in academic programs that can provide transfer credits to a four-year institution, a traditional mission of community colleges. Instead, an increasing number of students are opting for popular short-term workforce certification courses in skilled trades such as welding, truck driving or phlebotomy that can lead to being qualified for a career job in weeks or months, not years.

“The labor market is telling us — job seekers and career switchers are telling [us] — [that] this is what we need to have more of; this is where we need to make stronger investments,” says Randall Stamper, VCCS vice chancellor for workforce programs.

“We’re going through a significant tectonic shift among worker expectation and student expectation in respect to business demands,” Stamper adds. “There will still be folks who want an associate degree, but I think we’re going through a shift in education and it’s not unique to Virginia.”

Of the increasing interest in workforce training and certifications, Stamper says, “It’s not a crisis; it’s a natural change to a different model.”

Since 2011, when Virginia community college enrollment peaked at 197,226, enrollment has dropped by nearly 27%, to 144,215 in 2021.

Nationally, college enrollment has been falling in recent years and community colleges have been the hardest hit, shedding more than 827,000 students since the start of the pandemic, according to a May report by the National Student Clearing House Research Center.

Community colleges argue that there is no one factor that has spurred enrollment declines, and no one solution to stanching the losses.

The Virginia Community College System’s FastForward program offers 6- to 12-week workforce training classes in high-demand trades like pipefitting, seen here at Brightpoint Community College. Photo courtesy Virginia Community College System

“It’s a mix of multiple factors,” Stamper says. “It’s declining birth rates … It’s higher education in general. The return-on-investment consideration by the public has shifted.”

It’s a common public complaint that college educations, which are more expensive than ever, don’t carry the same ROI and cachet they once had. Students aren’t flocking to colleges and universities in the numbers they once did, some observers say, wary of taking on crushing debt and earning degrees that may not pay off. Six in 10 college seniors in 2019 held student loan debt, owing an average of $28,950, according to a study by the Institute for College Access & Success.

“We’re seeing increases [in enrollment], but we’re seeing increases in different places,” Stamper adds, stressing that workforce training enrollment is rising while enrollment in some other areas, such as transfer programs, has fallen.

Sharon Morrissey, VCCS vice chancellor for academic and workforce programs, was appointed interim chancellor of the community college system in June, while a search for a permanent chancellor is underway.

Plainly put, Morrissey says, the community college system’s workforce training role is critical because Virginia needs more workers, a point Gov. Glenn Youngkin has expressed while insisting that his administration have a seat at the hiring panel’s table for the next VCCS chancellor. The previous hire for chancellor withdrew amid controversy, leading to Morrissey’s appointment.

“We’ve got 300,000 jobs that are unfilled because there are not enough workers,” Morrissey says. “We know that a lot of people are not out there looking for jobs, because wages have increased.”

Hitting FastForward

The heavy lifter among the state community college system’s workforce efforts is FastForward, an initiative offering short-term workforce training programs for high-demand employment sectors.

Started in 2016, FastForward came out of a statewide tour during which community college officials asked business and industrial leaders across the state what they needed most.

The resounding answer: “Qualified workers.”

In 2015, the General Assembly inserted language in the state budget that directed the VCCS chancellor to develop a plan to address a gap in middle-skills work — jobs that require some postsecondary education, but not necessarily a degree.

Community college workforce training programs usually last six to 12 weeks and offer a flexible learning schedule so that working students can earn industry credentials and certifications, choosing among dozens of career paths.

On average, students who earn credentials through a FastForward training program can go on to earn a median annual wage of $36,928, a 36% increase over their previous wages, according to VCCS data.

In certain high-demand jobs, the median wage increases over students’ former wages can be even more significant: construction, 70% gain; manufacturing, 61%; health care, 61%; transportation, 53%.

Since 2016, FastForward has seen 50% growth in enrollment, with FastForward students earning about one-fifth of the 32,000-plus degrees, diplomas and certificates awarded by the community college system in the last academic year. About 96% of FastForward students complete their courses and about 72% of those students pass the tests needed to earn credentials that qualify them for jobs.

“The average FastForward student is
34 years old. Two out of three of them have dependents, and 20% of them had been on public benefits in the year before they enrolled. So, it’s a different kind of student,” Stamper says.

The state underwrites the cost of workforce training programs, which are noncredit programs that lead to an industry credential or a third-party credential. It could be anything from a state license issued by the Board of Nursing to a certification from the American Welding Society.

“We’ve got 300,000 jobs that are unfilled because there are not enough workers,” says Sharon Morrissey, interim chancellor of the community college system. Photo by Caroline Martin

FastForward also has a unique twist.

“Everybody has skin in the game, and it pays for performance,” Stamper says. “To our knowledge, it’s the only pay-for-performance … college-based [program] in the country.”

Here’s how it works: The student pays the first third of the cost of tuition. If the student completes the training course successfully, the state pays for the second third of the cost. When the student earns an industry credential, usually by sitting for an examination or demonstrating an acquired skill, the state will pay the final third. If the student doesn’t successfully complete the training, the student is responsible for the second third, and the college is not paid for the final third.

Another new state workforce initiative is G3 (Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead), which provides tuition assistance for students pursuing degrees or certification in high-demand fields, including health care, information technology and manufacturing.

“G3 is for people who have a family income of less than 400% of the federal poverty level. The 400% federal poverty level for a family of four is $100,000. Below $100,000 in a family of four, you qualify for G3,” Morrissey says.

G3 is “a last dollar program,” meaning it makes up the difference not covered by federal financial aid.

“It’s a brilliant program,” Morrissey says. “We just got through our first year. … We saw enrollment increase in these G3-eligible programs, while overall our enrollment continued in a decline mode last year, which tells us, just like the FastForward programs, there is a demand for funding to help students pay for the cost of college.”

High demand, fast hires

Even community college veterans are astonished by the rapid shift in the demand for workforce credentials. Amid ongoing labor shortages, industries turn to the community colleges to produce workers — preferably as fast as possible.

“I’ve been in workforce development for 22 years and I’ve never seen anything like this labor market. Employers are working very closely with us to have first access to the students who are completing these [high-demand] programs,” says Elizabeth Creamer, vice president of workforce development and credential attainment for the Community College Workforce Alliance.

A joint workforce training division of Brightpoint and Reynolds community colleges in the Richmond region, CCWA helps create skilled talent pipelines for businesses, as well as providing training credentials to connect job seekers with living-wage jobs that don’t require a college degree.

CCWA offers training for 33 FastForward programs focusing on areas such as health care, information technology, transportation and logistics, and manufacturing. It’s had a good track record so far, with companies such as Philip Morris USA, DuPont, Gerdau and Standard Motor Products Inc. hiring workers out of CCWA programs. Philip Morris, DuPont and other companies have also partnered with CCWA on apprenticeship programs.

Employers ranging from local governments to Fortune 500 companies are clamoring for workers in a variety of trades that don’t require four-year degrees, says Elizabeth Creamer with the Community College Workforce Alliance. Photo by Caroline Martin

Just since January, VCU Health has hired 29 clinical medical assistants from CCWA training programs, and Henrico County hired three graduates of a new training program for 911 emergency dispatchers.

During the pandemic, Creamer says, workforce programs saw a dramatic increase in enrollment.

Overall CCWA enrollment dropped from 7,449 to 5,737 between 2019 and 2021, largely due to a lack of enrollment for in-person professional development classes during the pandemic. During the same time period, however, enrollment in short-term certification programs skyrocketed at CCWA, which saw its FastForward program enrollment grow by 49% to 2,300 students. And some programs, like health care, saw 80% growth over pre-pandemic enrollment levels.

In 2020, Glenn and Suzanne Youngkin started the Virginia Ready Initiative, which collaborates with the FastForward program to help people laid off during the pandemic get skilled for in-demand jobs in health care, IT, cybersecurity and manufacturing. Those who complete FastForward credentials get $1,000 in cash on top of state funding.

During the pandemic, Creamer says, “there were major shifts in the employment market: Restaurant workers were out of work, [as were] food service and hospitality workers. A lot of them came to us for training.”

And the demand in many fields is so great, Creamer says, that skilled workers such as electricians, HVAC technicians and health care and technology workers can find jobs almost as soon as they qualify. Some employers even show up on the last day of classes to get the first opportunity to recruit new graduates with in-demand skills.

“These are working adults who are making sacrifices to be here … and they’re coming because they’re trying to get ahead,” Creamer says of students entering FastForward programs.

Life-changing opportunities

In fact, one of her favorite workforce training success stories comes from her own family.

“My son-in-law started with workforce training programs. He became a pipe fitter,” Creamer says. “And then he got an apprenticeship in his company, and the apprenticeship also afforded him a community college degree in mechanical engineering technology. Then he used his company’s tuition benefits to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Old Dominion University.”

Not yet 30, Creamer’s son-in-law now “has about 10 years’ experience in the trades,” she says proudly. “He has an [associate] degree in a technology field and he has an engineering degree — and all of that without any student debt and marrying my daughter and having two children.”

Workforce training programs also offer a chance for redemption for some students.

Consider Keon Melton, who was released from prison in January after serving a 10-year sentence for robbery. At 36, Melton, who lives in Portsmouth, says he’s trying to restart his life, establish a relationship with his two sons, 19 and 10, and become a productive member of society.

Melton read a lot in prison and became a tutor for other prisoners seeking their GEDs, he says. After prison, he felt lost, he says, until he entered a welding training program at Tidewater Community College. “Opportunities are opening up,” he says. “Once I came across the welding, it set me up for a career.”

With a recommendation from his welding instructor, an area employer hired Melton before he’d even finished the class. In his new Portsmouth-area job, Melton has welded doors at an Amazon warehouse and helped on a ship repair, among other projects.

Tamara Williams, vice president for workforce solutions at TCC, says welders are in such high demand, especially in the region’s maritime industry, that the college established a mobile welding lab as part of a partnership between TCC, the city of Norfolk and Lyon Shipyard.

Statewide effort

In Southwest Virginia, Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap created a workforce training pipeline for medical records professionals that led Rochester, New York-based eHealth Technologies to create 160 new jobs in Scott County.

“We were building a pipeline before the opportunity for employees was there,” says Vickie Ratliff, retired vice president of academic services at Mountain Empire.

Ratliff credits Will Payne, who leads regional economic development organizations InvestSWVA and Coalfield Strategies LLC, with connecting eHealth with Mountain Empire.

Payne is also working with four community colleges in Southwest Virginia to explore how manufacturing companies in the region could become part of the supply chain for the offshore wind energy industry being created in Hampton Roads.

Adam Hutchison, president of Virginia Highlands Community College, lived and worked in Texas, the biggest wind energy-producing state, and he believes that making parts for wind turbines could be a good fit for the manufacturing heritage and skill sets of Southwest Virginia, where coal production once flourished.

“We have companies that know how to build and make stuff … and people who know how to build and make stuff,” he says.

Community college workforce training programs are also crucial to advanced manufacturing industries coming into Southern Virginia, where textile and furniture manufacturing once dominated.

Workforce programs in community colleges often work in tandem with the Virginia Talent Accelerator Program. A workforce training program created in 2019 by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership in partnership with VCCS, VTAP provides free custom workforce training and recruitment solutions for companies locating or expanding within Virginia.

A good example of VTAP’s collaborative impact can be seen in Tyson Foods’
$350 million manufacturing plant in Danville, says Mike Grundmann, VEDP’s senior vice president of talent solutions. VTAP created a website to recruit workers, and Danville Community College offered training for the mechatronic technicians Tyson needed to repair and maintain equipment at the facility.

Morrissey, the interim chancellor, says that transfer programs to four-year colleges still account for the largest enrollment demand in community colleges, and she doesn’t see that changing.

The community college system, Morrissey explains, still plays a valuable role in saving students and their families money by allowing them to study for two years at a less expensive community college before going on to a university.

“The governor and the secretary of education have both acknowledged the value of bachelor’s degrees,” she says. “That’s workforce preparation, too.”

A new outlook

When Ajay Vinzé takes over as dean of George Mason University’s School of Business on July 1, he will carry with him a lifetime of experience in higher education.

He also comes with a plan to help streamline how education is delivered and to reduce the cost of a college degree — a contentious topic that has gnawed at college officials and the public for decades.

At the University of Missouri’s Robert J. Trulaske Sr. College of Business, where he was dean for five years before accepting GMU’s deanship, Vinzé advanced online credentials and certificates, as well as experiential learning opportunities for students.

He hopes to do some of the same at George Mason and is a proponent of modular education — the division of conventional courses into smaller components or modules — as one way of reducing the overall cost of education while permitting students to accumulate the skills and certifications they need to move expeditiously from the classroom to the workplace.

“The cost of higher education is a concern,” Vinzé says, “and how we deliver how higher education is consumed.”

As of May, approximately 44 million Americans owed $1.7 billion in student loans, and the College Board reported that average annual tuition increased to $10,740 at public four-year colleges for the 2021-22 academic year, more than twice the average $4,160 annual tuition for the 1991-92 school year. For in-state undergraduates at Mason, the 2021-22 tuition rate was $9,510.

Vinzé says there’s room for improvement: “Instead of institutions saying, ‘Thou shalt take all of these courses,’ why can’t we create education in smaller modules that society more broadly can consume in ways that are directly applicable and that stack up into a degree?

“When we talk about mass customization and we talk about stackable [degree programs] and so on, what we’re doing is delivering education in a more focused way,” he says. “You reduce the exposure to things that are adding to the cost but are not adding to the experience.”

Explaining how costs can be trimmed while providing students with what they want and need, Vinzé uses an analogy about compact discs.

Back in the 1990s, he says, “I remember that CDs were a big thing. At some point in time when you bought a CD, you had to buy all 14 songs that were on that CD. You actually liked only three of them, but you paid for the whole CD.” That changed when iTunes and other services sold songs individually for download. Now, streaming services have changed the music marketplace even more.

Academia needs to also consider keeping up with modern students’ expectations of education and the fact that one size never fits all, Vinzé says. “To do these things, you have to have an institution that has a willingness to do these things — colleagues who are willing — because it changes the way faculty deliver courses. It changes the way we present courses.”

The incoming business school dean anticipates there will be resistance and is prepared for it. “These are very smart people with Ph.D.s. If you appeal to them with reason and research, they will be more accepting. If you try to push it down their throats, that’s not going to work.”

However, the main thing, Vinzé says, is that “we can’t afford to say, ‘We won’t change.’”

‘Time to start running’

As an administrator, Vinzé was influenced by what he researched and practiced during his time at Arizona State University, Texas A&M and in private industry.

He would best describe himself as an “educational entrepreneur.” And one aspect of being an entrepreneur, he notes, is a willingness to take risks — sometimes to fail and then regroup.

“Sometimes you have these great ideas. Sometimes the ideas are premature, sometimes your thinking was premature. Sometimes the situation is not right. I’ve experienced all of those along the way,” Vinzé says. “A number of times I was pushing, pushing, pushing, and maybe that wasn’t the right time to push.”

Vinzé isn’t waiting for his official start date to think about how he will be making an impact on Mason, a university he found inspiring when he interviewed for the dean’s position.

“I was not looking to leave Missouri, but the Mason opportunity grabbed my attention in a big way,” he says. “It is an outstanding institution, a young institution and one with a tremendous trajectory upwards. Lastly, the location: Mason is this vibrant institution that sits at the edge of a vibrant city.”

After meeting with GMU President Gregory Washington, who was dean of the University of California, Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, Vinzé found they were of similar minds.

“My thinking aligned very nicely with his thinking in terms of being forward-looking, being a positive force for change, which is what higher education institutions should be,” Vinzé says.

Even before his official start, he has put together a transition team to study potential partnerships, especially those that drive innovation and entrepreneurship. The team also is at work recalibrating the future of business education and examining options.

“I’m not a very patient man by nature,” Vinzé says. “When I arrive in July, it’s no time to think ‘What now?’ but time to start running.”

With more than 39,000 students, George Mason is Virginia’s largest public research university. Since 2012, enrollment has soared by nearly 19%, according to data from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).

U.S. News & World Report recently named GMU the most diverse university in the state. In fall 2021, students of color represented about 53% of total enrollment, rising from about 35% a decade earlier, SCHEV’s numbers indicate.

Mason’s also growing geographically, from its main Fairfax campus to outposts in Prince William and Arlington, as well as in South Korea. The business school has an enrollment of 4,500 undergraduates and 700 graduate students, spread across five centers that focus on government contracting, innovation and entrepreneurship, real estate, retail and “business for a better world.”

Vinzé says each of the centers offers “wonderful windows for connecting with partners” in the region, and he plans to maximize their outreach.

The meaning of business

The Business for a Better World Center (B4BW) may be the most unusual of the centers, integrating elements of a liberal education into a business school environment. It was founded in 2019 to acknowledge rising interest in having the business community engage in societal and environmental issues.

In a recently published case study about the center, GMU professors say that while the School of Business and B4BW endorse a view that “a liberal education offers the best preparation for work, citizenship and life,” they explain that a liberal education is different from the liberal arts. A liberal education refers not to specific disciplines or fields of study, such as arts and languages, but to the ability to foster a broad knowledge base from multiple fields of studies, as well as high-level intellectual and practical skills.

In one B4BW program, business students and students from other parts of the university and a variety of disciplines are brought together to study the role of business in society and its capacity to be a force for good in the world.

Lisa Gring-Pemble, an associate professor and the center’s co-executive director, says B4BW is helping equip future leaders to work in businesses that have more than profits on their mind.

That proposition, she suggests, seems to define the spirit of the age as Generation Z begins to exert its influence on business. “The incoming generation really cares about aligning their work with their own values,” Gring-Pemble says, “and they care deeply about giving back to their communities.”

For baby boomers, economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman defined the social responsibility of business. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game,” Friedman wrote in a 1970 editorial for The New York Times.

But Gring-Pemble says that in recent years, an increasing number of business leaders have embraced a different worldview, saying that companies must balance financial performance with “making a positive contribution to society,” quoting Larry Fink, the billionaire chairman and CEO of BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest investment management firm. Fink has promoted the idea of businesses being aware of their impact on society.

Sustainability is one of the core values of the university at large, and B4BW has ongoing initiatives focused on sustainability.

Yasmin Jubran, a junior double-majoring in marketing and business analytics, grew up in Palestine and enrolled in George Mason because of its location in a busy and rapidly growing business region. She also cites “the great opportunity it offers for diversity and inclusion. I’m a firm believer to be a better businessperson overall, you need to learn more about other disciplines and other cultures.”

Jubran recently completed a project exploring whether environmental sustainability could be marketed through mobile gaming. She says that many people in her generation are concerned about the environment and creating greater sustainability — and they are seeking employers that share their values.

As he arrives as dean of GMU’s School of Business, Vinzé says he’s acutely aware that universities — like businesses — have to pay attention to what the rising generation of digital natives is looking for, both from their learning environment and in their jobs. “The expectations have changed.”

That seems apparent, Gring-Pemble says. Students in Mason’s business school are exposed to Friedman’s theory, as well as the ideas of more contemporary business leaders and economists, who are pushing different priorities.

But she says there’s no doubt about where her center stands on the subject: “We’ve planted our flag … and we’ve said that business as a positive force for good is what we’re about. That’s one of the tenets of the School of Business.”

To introduce the general population of undergraduate students to the world of business — students who may have never considered such a pathway before — the school created the Business Foundations program within B4BW.

The program focuses on personal and professional skills, as well as business in societal, global and legal contexts. Credits earned there can be applied to Mason’s general education requirements.

Gring-Pemble says they didn’t expect the high demand the program has received. The program started with four sections of five or six undergraduate classes, and within two years the program ramped up to 20 sections because of outsize demand.

Students cite a wide variety of reasons for wanting to be a part of the Business Foundations program.

“We had people from health and human services who said, ‘We’d like to explore a business class that would give me credit for a general education, but which might also interest me in a business minor,’” Gring-Pemble says. “We had a student from the visual arts saying, ‘I’d like to see what a business class looks like.’”

Among the Business Foundations faculty’s
areas of research are cryptocurrency, sustainable beekeeping and environmental research communications, and they hold a wide variety of degrees in topics ranging from history and political science to writing and business.

“I think what we’re doing is really special and unique, and it’s our willingness to say [that] it’s not just about business education,” Gring-Pemble says. “It’s how business is interacting with history and philosophy, health and economics and engineering.”

At a glance

Founded
Originally formed in 1949 as an extension of the University of Virginia, George Mason University formally separated from U.Va. in 1972.

Campus
Mason’s main campus is located on 677 acres in Fairfax County, just south of Fairfax city and about 20 miles outside Washington, D.C. Mason’s Arlington campus, located in the county’s urban Clarendon business district, is home to the Antonin Scalia Law School and the Schar School of Policy and Government. The university also has the Science and Technology Campus in Manassas; the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation campus in Front Royal; and the Mason Korea campus in Songdo, South Korea.

Enrollment

38,629 (fall 2021)

Student profile

Female: 52.6%

Male: 47%

In-state: 80.2%

Minority: 53%

Academic programs
In 2021-22, Mason offered 213 total degree programs, including 80 undergraduate degree programs, 93 master’s degree programs, 39 doctoral degree programs and one First Professional Juris Doctorate program.

Faculty
GMU has 1,662 full-time instructional and research faculty.

Tuition, fees, housing and dining

In-state tuition and fees: $13,119

Out-of-state tuition and fees: $36,579

Room and board: $12,630

Home improvement

Affordable housing isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the University of Virginia.

But it’s top of mind for U.Va. officials who have pledged to support the development of 1,000 to 1,500 affordable housing units in Charlottesville and Albemarle County over the next decade.

To jump-start the effort, U.Va. is offering land on three parcels owned either by the university or the U.Va. Foundation, which manages the university’s financial and real estate assets. Select developers will be chosen to build affordable housing communities on the properties under long-term ground leases. In turn, the developers will be responsible for designing, financing, building, promoting and maintaining the communities. No money from university donors, nor any state funds, will be used on the projects, according to U.Va.

When the affordable housing plan was announced in 2020, and then delayed by the pandemic, then-U.Va. Rector James B. Murray Jr. laid out the guidelines: “This is housing for teachers, policemen, firemen, social workers, people that earn a wage but cannot afford to live in our community.”

He added, “While many of the university’s own employees may qualify, this is not just for them. We’ve made a conscious decision that we are doing this for the community. We’re not doing it for U.Va., so it’s going to be first come, first served, and there will be no priority for U.Va. employees.”

U.Va.’s affordable housing initiative will be conducted in tandem with local government efforts by Charlottesville and Albemarle County to increase affordable housing. Several higher education institutions, including Ohio State University, Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, also are addressing affordable housing in their communities.

“I believe strongly that U.Va. and our neighbors in Charlottesville and Albemarle County are linked together and our fates are tied together. Increasing the supply of affordable housing is one part of that,” U.Va. President James E. Ryan said during a May 2021 Zoom meeting with community members.

“We aren’t the first ones to address this,” says Pace Lochte, U.Va.’s assistant vice president for economic development. Lochte also serves as co-project manager for the affordable housing initiative.

“We come at the end of a long line of other organizations that have very successful projects: Habitat for Humanity, the Piedmont Housing Alliance and others. There have been a ton of people who have been doing this work for decades. We want to contribute to the solution,” Lochte says.

Besides working to add more affordable housing in the region, Lochte says, the university is seeking opportunities to house more university students on U.Va.’s campus — known as “the Grounds” — in order to free up space in the local housing market.

Currently about 62% of U.Va.’s nearly 17,300 undergraduates (as of fall 2021) live off campus, typically in the community, contributing to the economy but also straining the amount of available affordable housing.

Lochte emphasizes that none of the affordable housing that would be built under the U.Va. initiative would be for students.

A growing need

Lochte also readily acknowledges that the housing initiative faces myriad hurdles.

“It’s a very challenging environment in many regards,” she says. “As a nation, we have rising interest rates, we have supply chain issues, we have an increasing need [and] we have constructions costs going up.”

The need for affordable housing has been building in the Charlottesville region, as well as at the university itself, for years.

In its affordable housing plan, the city acknowledges that, like many other U.S. cities, Charlottesville “is in an affordable housing crisis.”

During Charlottesville’s first-ever housing summit in 2018, city officials presented data showing that one out of five Charlottesville residents earned less than $23,000 a year, but most of the city’s available housing required an income two or three times that amount.

Historically speaking, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in the 1940s the maximum affordable rent for federally subsidized housing was set at 20% of income, which rose to 25% of income in 1969 and 30% of income in 1981.

Over time the 30% of income threshold also became the standard for owner-occupied housing, and it remains the indicator of affordability for housing in the United States.

The 2018 Charlottesville housing summit pointed out the pain lower income residents experienced when seeking housing in the Charlottesville/Albemarle region:

23% of Charlottesville’s renter households were spending more than half their household income for housing.

Among the 13 large apartment complexes in or just outside the city, monthly rents averaged $1,384. To afford that rent, a single person working a minimum-wage job would need to work 147 hours per week.

Average rents in the region’s competitive apartment buildings had climbed 18.1% since 2012, rising by 9.4% in 2017 alone.

Since 2010, the city has invested $46.7 million in affordable housing, according to a data presented at a City Council meeting earlier this year. Those expenditures have resulted in 1,600 affordable housing units either being constructed or preserved, and 2,300 households receiving assistance.

According to Charlottesville’s compre- hensive plan, the city and Albemarle County are expected to add 15,000 additional households by 2040.

“We need 3,000 to 4,000 additional affordable housing units over the next 10 years,” says Alexander Ikefuna, interim director for the city Office of Community Solutions.

He notes that the city’s current comprehensive plan has a goal of earmarking $10 million per year for the next 10 years toward affordable housing, with the goals of increasing the number of subsidized affordable homes by 1,100 homes (on top of an existing stock of 1,630 actively subsidized homes); preserving 600 existing subsidized affordable homes; and stabilizing 1,600 to 2,000 owner and renter households facing housing instability.

Only 38% of U.Va.’s 17,300 undergraduate students live on campus, adding to the demand for local affordable housing options. Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan

‘We are the community’

In Albemarle County, a comprehensive regional housing study in 2019 found that more than 10,000 county homeowners and renters are paying more than the recommended 30% of their income for housing, and the gulf is expected to widen over the next 20 years.

“It’s gotten worse faster than I think any of us expected,” says Stacy Pethia, Albemarle’s housing policy manager.

According to U.S. Census data, median household income in the Charlottesville/Albemarle region is $59,598, with 23.1% of people living under the poverty line.

“What it means at the moment is that more people qualify for affordable housing,” Pethia says, noting that the area median family income is what is used to determine who qualifies to rent or buy an affordable housing unit.

HUD has estimated that a modest two-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $1,264 per month in Albemarle. “This amounts to an average wage of $24.30/hour ($50,544 annually),” says Pethia. “The most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s … [employment and wages] survey suggests that approximately 54% of workers earn less than that amount.”

Affordable housing has long battled against a stigma, Pethia says. “Most people, when they hear ‘affordable housing,’ they think of public housing that is run down, and they associate it with high-crime areas and high poverty. That’s not what it is. We should all have affordable housing.”

U.Va. itself has had affordable housing problems, with respect to its lower-wage employees.

In February 2019, the university reported that nearly 2,400 U.Va. employees earned less than $15 an hour — or $30,000 a year — while a two-bedroom apartment in the region rented for $15,900 anually. Soon afterward, U.Va. announced that it was raising its hourly minimum wage from $12.75 to $15, starting in January 2020.

“As a university, we should live our values — and part of that means that no one who works at U.Va. should live in poverty,” Ryan, U.Va.’s president, said when announcing the minimum wage increase.

As part of its efforts to make more affordable housing available in the community, the university is studying a proposal to expand on-campus housing for second-year students.

The university’s support of affordable housing is part of U.Va.’s “Great and Good” strategic plan, which includes a Good Neighbor Program that outlines the university’s intention to work with area stakeholders with a goal of making the region “a just and sustainable community” by addressing issues such as affordable housing, living wages and access to health care.

In December 2021, U.Va. designated three properties the university and foundation could offer as development sites for affordable housing: the current location of U.Va.’s Piedmont Housing off Fontaine Avenue; the corner of Wertland and 10th streets; and portions of U.Va.’s North Fork research park on U.S. 29 North.

The Piedmont Apartments, historically reserved for faculty members and short-term leases, are situated near the Fontaine Research Park at 115 and 117 Mimosa Drive, less than a mile from U.Va.’s Central Grounds and the U.Va. Medical Center.

Under the affordable housing plan, the existing apartment buildings and ranch houses on the Piedmont property, except for a historic structure on the site, would likely be replaced with new development.

“We will look to the developer(s) selected through a competitive process to tell us what is possible in terms of affordability,” a university spokesperson said via email. “We expect the development to be mixed income, serving people at many levels of affordability.”

Announcing the proposed affordable housing sites, Ryan said, “Economic growth over many decades has had a profound effect on housing in the Charlottesville-Albemarle community, and we are committed to working with community partners to create more housing intended for local workforce and community members who have been priced out of the local housing market.”

According to U.Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Charlottesville’s population has increased 7.2%, or more than 3,000 residents, over the past decade, with a 2020 population of 46,555. Albemarle County has grown from about 99,000
in 2010 to 112,000 in 2021, a 13.5% jump. Meanwhile, U.Va.’s enrollment has risen from 23,907 in fall 2012 to 26,026 in fall 2021.

This type of growth has put increased strain on the demand for housing of all types, including affordable housing.

“One in three jobs in our region are attributed to U.Va.,” Lochte says. “We are the community, and the community is us. It’s not like we’re a separate island. We’re facing the same things.”

PROFILE

Founded
Sometimes called Mr. Jefferson’s university or just The University, U.Va. was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. Its first board of visitors included Jefferson and fellow U.S. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe.

Campus
With roughly 1,240 contiguous acres around its UNESCO World Heritage Site campus or “Grounds,” U.Va. is known for its distinctive Jefferson-designed Rotunda building located on The Lawn, the school’s 4.5-acre grass quad where graduations are held. U.Va.’s other major holding is the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, a four-year liberal arts college in Southwest Virginia.

Enrollment

About 17,300 undergraduate students

About 8,700 graduate students

About 2,300 international students

32% minority enrollment

68% in-state undergraduate students

Employees
Approximately 4,300 faculty, 16,300 staff and 10,000 UVA Health employees

Academic programs
Notable for its medicine, law and nursing schools, U.Va. offers more than 120 majors across 12 schools.

Tuition, fees, housing and dining^*
Includes average room and board, plus books and other expenses.

In-state residents: $35,582

Out-of-state residents: $72,004

*Note: Costs are for first-year students and may differ depending on year and academic program.

The Royals of Regent

Although Lynchburg’s Liberty University has grabbed plenty of headlines in recent years, Virginia Beach-based Regent University can more than hold its own as a politically influential private Christian institution.

Founded and still run by the 92-year-old televangelist and culture warrior M.G. “Pat” Robertson, Regent now has 11,000 students, 80% of whom are enrolled online. The average student’s age is 37, and the university’s programs are squarely focused on the Bible — to the point that law classes are 10 minutes longer than usual to allow time for Christian devotions.

Robertson started The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. (CBN) in 1960, and he revolutionized religious broadcasting when he launched its flagship program, “The 700 Club,” in 1966, adopting a daily newsmagazine format instead of televising sermons and church services.

Regent was incorporated as CBN University in 1977, offering only graduate-level classes at first. The next year, it welcomed about 70 students for graduate studies in communications and the arts. In 1990, CBN University was renamed Regent University, and as of 2022, the university offers more than 150 areas of study and an athletic program established in 2016 with the nickname “Royals.”

Similar to the late Jerry Falwell, Robertson was a pioneer in marrying evangelical Christianity to conservative politics, helping change the way the nation thinks about both. That connection carries through at Regent, whose alumni include Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, former Gov. Bob McDonnell, Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer, 53 sitting judges, hundreds of professors at various colleges and 14 university presidents.

“Before my time, no one took evangelical Christians as serious members of the political class,” Robertson said via email. “They were always on the outside looking in. Since my work, evangelicals have become a major factor in public elections and in truth make up part of a winning coalition that has seen conservatives elected as mayors, city council members, state legislators, congressmen, senators and presidents. Without evangelicals, this remarkable transformation wouldn’t have taken place.”

A graduate of Yale Law School and Washington & Lee University who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP presidential nomination in 1988, Robertson no longer grants in-person interviews, the university says, but he’s still actively involved in the university’s operations. In October 2021, Robertson retired from hosting “The 700 Club,” handing the mantle to his son Gordon Robertson.

But the senior Robertson, who has sparked many controversies over the years for his on-air comments about everything from Islam and 9/11 to abortion and the LGBTQ community, has not forgotten how to shake things up. In February, Robertson made headlines for declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “compelled by God” to invade Ukraine, fulfilling a biblical prophecy that would lead to an invasion of Israel predicted in the Bible’s New Testament.

When asked how he would like to be remembered, however, Robertson doesn’t mention the prophecies and predictions that have long played a part in his charismatic ministry. “I hope my legacy will be this: ‘He served God and his generation,’” Robertson says simply.

It is not clear who will succeed Robertson as the head of Regent, when that time comes.

“The board of trustees does not want that to be public knowledge,” says Chris Roslan, a Regent spokesman, who also would not say whether members of the Robertson family might be involved in leadership roles at Regent in the years to come.

Currently, all Regent vice presidents and executive vice presidents report directly to Pat Robertson.

Virtual reach

Like fellow Christian institution Liberty University, Regent has seen its enrollment grow from offering online degree programs, which it first rolled out in 1997.

“For 10 consecutive years, Regent’s online bachelor’s program has been recognized as the best online bachelor’s [program] in Virginia by U.S. News & World Report,” says William L. Hathaway, Regent’s executive vice president for academic affairs.

Regent has taken steps to ensure the quality of its online degrees, taking a different tack from other colleges, which set up their virtual programs to function as parallel online universities, Hathaway says. “Instead, we choose to house our distance programs or offerings in the same academic units that offer our on-campus programming. There is no difference in the curricular expectations or quality standards among the faculty in our various disciplines between our online and on-campus programs.”

However, prospective students sometimes do want to know whether being taught from a Christian perspective will impact the quality of education they receive.

“They want to make sure our education really is a distinctively Christian education without compromising the standard professional or disciplinary training that is being received, even if they are not personally identified with some Christian tradition,” he says. “In short, they hope our Christian mission is a ‘value-added’ component to the education.”

While Regent is a Christian university, its students represent many denominations. “From Roman Catholics to Pentecostal, we have a wide range of faith expressions here,” Hathaway says.

The preponderance of classes at Regent are taught by adjunct faculty, who represent about 80% of the university’s nearly 1,500 faculty members.

Because students involved in distance education are taught by faculty who are located away from Virginia Beach, the university has a greater pool of qualified faculty to draw from — as well as a financial consideration. Adjunct faculty complement the full-time faculty and add “substantial, cost-effective capacity to our university, allowing us to keep tuition and other costs competitive,” according to Hathaway.

In a region dominated by military installations, Regent also has been active in enrolling and supporting veterans and their spouses.

Political influence

A 2012 candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government. Photo courtesy Regent University

While Regent’s scholarship and educational offerings represent conservative perspectives more than many other colleges and universities, its students represent a range of sociopolitical perspectives because they are drawn from a pool of applicants both national and worldwide, Hathaway says.

However, a lesbian Regent law student joined a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education last year to challenge the religious exemption to Title IX, which the 40 plaintiffs say allows discrimination against LGBTQ students at Christian colleges and universities.

Among Regent’s faculty are some Republican Party luminaries, including former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, who sought the GOP nomination for president in 2012.

Bachmann is the dean of Regent’s Robertson School of Government, which offers master’s degrees in five subjects: American government, national security studies, campaigns and leadership, public administration, and international development.

Bachmann, who grew up in a Democratic family, supported and campaigned for Democrat Jimmy Carter for president but switched her allegiance to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

A mother of five, Bachmann has been a vocal opponent of abortion and once introduced a proposed constitutional amendment in the Minnesota Senate to bar the state from recognizing same-sex marriage. News accounts have characterized her as a vocal skeptic of global warming.

But Bachmann says the Robertson School of Government — which has 174 students in its master’s programs, the majority of whom study online — encourages students to form their own opinions.

“Our students come to us from all over the world and from diverse backgrounds,” she says. “At RSG, we work hard to offer the finest instruction possible in accordance with biblical principles. Students form their own personal and political viewpoints.”

A rising GOP star, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears received a full scholarship to attend Regent’s School of Business & Leadership, from which she earned a graduate degree in organizational leadership.

One of the takeaways from her Regent education, the lieutenant governor says, was the idea of servant leadership.

“You have to earn respect; you don’t demand respect,” she says. “But once you sit in the big chair, you better be able to lead, so you better know what you’re doing. So, I got that from Regent.”

Another big-name faculty member at Regent is former Virginia governor and attorney general Bob McDonnell, who attended Regent when it was known as CBN University.

McDonnell was a decade away from his graduation from the University of Notre Dame — having served in the military for four years and later worked in business — when he began thinking about taking advantage of his G.I. Bill and getting more education.

“I also really became interested in the integration of faith and learning and the founding of our country, and I wanted to find out more about government. Having been raised in the Catholic Church, I was always interested in how faith affects all aspects of life, especially government,” McDonnell says. “I thought Regent would be a great place to learn.”

He earned a master’s degree in public policy and a law degree from Regent. Today, McDonnell teaches a limited number of law classes at Regent’s law and government schools. He also continues to practice law and provides consulting services.

“I practiced law for 33 years, and I have experience in government. I am able to translate to the students between the theoretical and academic versus the practical world of politics and government,” McDonnell says, adding that he also helps students find internships and make connections with those who might help them in their careers.

Legal precedents

Seen here in 2005, now-92-year-old Regent Chancellor Pat Robertson stepped down in October 2021 as the longtime host of “The 700 Club,” the flagship TV show on his Christian Broadcasting Network. Photos courtesy Regent University — Seen here in 2005, now-92-year-old Regent Chancellor Pat Robertson stepped down in October 2021 as the longtime host of “The 700 Club,” the flagship TV show on his Christian Broadcasting Network. Photo courtesy Regent University

Regent is best known perhaps for its School of Law. Founded in 1986, Regent’s law school has launched many prominent careers, particularly in conservative politics.

Regent Law is led by Dean Mark Martin, a former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice who was also an informal legal adviser to President Donald Trump during his attempts to contest the 2020 election.

According to The New York Times, Trump told Vice President Mike Pence that Martin had counseled Trump that Pence could stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results in the weeks following the 2020 election. Pence affirmed that the vice president doesn’t have the power to overturn a presidential election.

The Regent law school’s start was unusual, recalls Bachmann, who was enrolled at Oral Roberts University’s O.W. Coburn School of Law in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when that school closed in 1986 and moved to Virginia Beach to become a part of what was then CBN University.

“Virtually the entire law school was put on a moving truck,” Bachmann recalls, noting that she and her husband moved with the law school to Virginia, where she went on to receive a Master of Laws degree in taxation from William & Mary. “I shared the same moving truck as the law school.”

Today, with 861 students enrolled on campus and online, Regent’s law school offers a variety of study opportunities. Its structure demonstrates the close relationship between the university’s academic programs and its mission to provide “Christian leadership to change the world.”

“Every law class is 10 minutes longer than required to have time for a devotion,” notes Associate Dean of Administration and Admissions S. Ernie Walton. “The devotion often focuses on biblical principles that are relevant to the material that will be studied. During class, professors spend time not just teaching the substantive law, but analyzing and debating the law in light of Christian principles.”

Looking back over the development of Regent University from its origins 45 years ago to where it is today, founder Pat Robertson continues to hold to his original concept for the school.

“The vision of Regent is to be the most influential, transformational university in the world,” he says. “My goal with Regent is to see it not just rival Harvard and Yale, but to rival Oxford and [the] Sorbonne in the Middle Ages as a school that can impact the whole society. I believe that Regent is just getting warmed up, and the best is yet to come.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the fact that Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears earned her graduate degree from Regent’s School of Business & Leadership, not the Robertson School of Government, as originally reported.

At a glance

Founded
Regent was founded in 1977 by televangelist M.G. “Pat” Robertson as CBN University, a nod to the school’s close ties to the Christian Broadcasting Network, which Robertson started in 1960. The school was renamed Regent University in 1990.

Campus
The university’s 70-acre campus is dotted with stately neo-Georgian red brick buildings, including Robertson Hall, home to Regent’s School of Law and Robertson School of Government.

Enrollment
10,386 students

Student profile
Average age: 37
35.75% male; 64.24% female
42.42% full-time students;
57.57% part-time students
43.5% undergraduates;
46.2% graduate students
Minority: 47%

Employees
510 staff members
Faculty
Full-time faculty: 134
Part-time faculty: 675

Tuition and fees, housing and financial aid
Tuition and fees: $18,820
Room and board: $7,004
Average need-based financial aid awarded to first-year students seeking assistance: $5,417

SOURCE: U.S. News & World Report data for 2021-22 school year

On the line

“VMI is at a crossroads. As the world around VMI changes, the Institute must evolve or risk becoming irrelevant.” — One Corps – One VMI: A Unifying Action Plan

From a distance, Virginia Military Institute seems timeless, unchanging.

The rhythmic marching of the long lines of cadets, the stark outline of the barracks against the sky, the small-town atmosphere of Lexington, population 7,300
— they all contribute to a feeling that nothing ever changes at VMI, which was founded in 1839 and is the nation’s oldest state-supported military college.

But the hard truth is that VMI, which enrolled 1,652 cadets this academic year, is again undergoing another one of the seismic changes that has marked its history over the past half century:

1968: VMI is the last public college in Virginia to integrate.

1990: The mandatory commissioning policy requiring a cadet to accept a commission for active military duty upon graduation is abolished.

1997: VMI admits female cadets for the first time, following a long court battle to keep them out.

June 2021: An independent, state-ordered report finds evidence of “a racist and sexist culture” at the university.

“VMI is no stranger to change over the years, but in each and every instance, the changes have made us better,” says VMI’s superintendent, retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, who was appointed as VMI’s first Black superintendent in April 2021.

Wins had served as interim superintendent since November 2020 and spent his first several months on the job in listening sessions assessing VMI’s culture, policies and procedures.

His appointment as interim superintendent came soon after Gov. Ralph Northam, himself a VMI graduate, announced an investigation into allegations of racism at VMI that stemmed from exposés published by The Washington Post and The Roanoke Times.

After the state’s report on racism and sexism at VMI was released last summer, the military college launched a new page on its website titled, “Virginia Military Institute’s Promise.” While it acknowledges that “VMI is a microcosm of society and is not immune to challenges of racism and sexual misconduct which occur on college campuses across the nation,” it also states that “racism and sexual misconduct in any form will never be tolerated at VMI.”

While past acts of racism have occurred at VMI, Wins says that charges of “institutional racism” at VMI are not supported by the facts.

The university notes that:

Between 1992 and 2020, enrollment of cadets of color has increased from 12.7% to 23.4% of each class.

Total enrollment of underrepresented populations increased from 29% in 2014 to 35% in 2020.

Female cadets make up approximately 12% to 17% of each incoming class.

New VMI cadets call each other “brother rats,” signaling the reliance they have on each other to make it through the college’s “Rat Line.” Photo courtesy Virginia Military Institute

Steering the ship

Wins says the conversations he had during his listening sessions with cadets, including women and cadets of color, offered him a broader perspective on VMI’s culture.

“One of the [insights] I got from the women in the corps, many of whom are leaders in the corps, is the value they place on the experience of VMI not being different for them than it was for their male counterparts,” Wins says. And students of color, he adds, told him they value the close bonds they form with their fellow cadets, regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds.

“People appreciate the uniqueness of this small school,” Wins says, “and what it brings in those areas.”

Wins, who spent 34 years in the military, seems to have been preparing for the superintendent’s job his whole life, although he never sought it.

He grew up in a military household. His father was an Army enlisted man who served in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam and who became a police officer and later a U.S. marshal following his retirement. His mother was a civil servant who worked at the U.S. Government Publishing Office.

After turning down a basketball scholarship at the U.S. Naval Academy, Wins — a 6-foot-3-inch guard — accepted a scholarship to VMI and completed his career as the fifth-leading scorer in VMI’s history.

During his Army career, Wins held many leadership and staff assignments, including in the Headquarters Department of the Army and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. Prior to his retirement, he served as the first commanding general of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.

Wins says his parents taught him to work hard and set goals for himself. “VMI is second only to that set of teachings I received, in terms of how it influenced me to be the person I am,” he says.

So, when VMI alumni and officials reached out to him after former VMI Superintendent J.H. Binford Peay III resigned, Wins told them he was happy to help “steer the ship and navigate VMI.”

That has meant leading an effort to foster a more diverse VMI and to develop a more inclusive environment across the college.

Among the steps VMI has taken are reforms to the school’s student-run honor court. According to an investigation by The Washington Post, Black cadets made up around 43% of honor court expulsions between 2017 and 2020, despite accounting for only about 6% of VMI’s cadet population. Changes include enlarging the size of student juries and allowing pro bono attorneys to represent cadets accused of honor code violations, which can include cheating, lying and theft.

VMI also has begun minimizing its association with the Civil War and with the Confederate iconography that long had permeated its campus. Most notably, a statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, who had been a VMI professor, has been removed from campus, and Jackson’s name was erased from the main entrance to the old VMI barracks. Additionally, an annual parade honoring VMI cadets who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Battle of New Market has been renamed the Memorial Parade and recognizes all alumni who “died on the field of honor.”

Wins also hasn’t been afraid to take on alumni who have dismissed such efforts as supporting critical race theory — a social academic movement to explore the causes of systemic racism that has come under fire from conservative Republicans nationwide, including new Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

In January, Wins posted on a VMI Facebook group page, disputing critical comments made by a 1976 VMI alum on a Richmond radio show, saying that it was “categorically false” that VMI was teaching critical race theory.

Wins also took exception with the alum’s criticism of VMI seeking $6.1 million from the General Assembly to address issues brought up in the state investigation. The funding would go toward a variety of initiatives and positions, including establishing Title IX and diversity offices and hiring three admissions counselors focused on underrepresented populations at VMI.

The alum, Carmen D. Villani Jr., a retired airline pilot from Texas, later posted that he and Wins had spoken and found some “common ground.” Villani wrote, “Changes to preserve/enhance the VMI Experience should be strived for. I believe the best way for that to occur is if we place our focus on our common bond, not our differences; equality/ability, not equity; [and] inclusiveness based upon ‘content of character.’”

Notable alums

VMI alumnus Charles F. Bryan Jr., former president of the Virginia Historical Society (now the Virginia Museum of History & Culture), has long studied his alma mater.

“In the 1940s,” Bryan says, “the great historian Arnold Toynbee said the chief characteristic of the state of Virginia is its reluctance to change. And that applies as much if not more to VMI. I think it takes a while for many VMI alums to realize that it’s a different world out there and you have to change and adapt where you can or you’re going to become increasingly ossified.”

Bryan is one of a long list of notable VMI graduates. The college’s alums include governors, U.S. senators, 11 Rhodes scholars, a Nobel Peace Prize winner (Gen. George C. Marshall) and the most decorated Marine in history (Lt. Gen. Lewis “Chesty” Puller). Actors Dabney Coleman and Fred Willard were both VMI graduates, and the college can also lay claim to filmmaker Mel Brooks, who never matriculated at VMI but trained there for 12 weeks during World War II.

The college has the largest ROTC program in the country and has produced a long line of Army generals and as well as leaders in other branches of the military service.

Col. Neil Whitmore, VMI’s interim director of admissions, says the college enrolled 496 new cadets this academic year, on par with previous years.

VMI’s enrollment hasn’t suffered from press stories about racism and sexism accusations, he says, and although some questions came in when “the story first started to take hold,” there have been no negative comments during recruiting sessions.

Whitmore says that his experience has been that students are well-informed about VMI before they apply for admission. “VMI is not where someone applies on a whim,” Whitmore says.

Cadets routinely fall out for calisthenics, march and take agility and stamina tests that include running on hilly terrain and maneuvering through an obstacle course. Every cadet must complete four years of ROTC to earn their degree.

And, of course, the fabled VMI “Rat Line” puts new cadets through a crucible of shouted orders, walking at rigid attention along a prescribed route whenever they are inside barracks.

New cadets call each other “brother rats,” and VMI says it’s a process that creates lifelong bonds because the cadets have to depend on one another to make it through the rigors of the Rat Line.

Faces of change

If student life hasn’t changed much at VMI, its footprint has a little, with a variety of projects under construction, includinga $44.2 million Aquatic Center next to the Corps Physical Training Facility; the
$43.2 million renovation of Scott Shipp Hall; and a $19.3 million renovation to VMI’s library.

Perhaps more noteworthy, though, are the ongoing cultural changes at VMI. In May 2021, the college hired its first chief diversity officer, Jamica Love. She holds a doctorate in higher education administration and a master’s in counseling psychology from Northeastern University in Boston.

Love, whose parents were born in Alabama, says her father often counseled her “never go to the South,” and some of her friends in Massachusetts, where she has spent her adult life, were worried about racism in Virginia. “And I said, ‘What, like we don’t think they have racists in Massachusetts?’” Love says she was surprised to be selected by VMI, but she knew immediately “it was a place you can go and really be needed.”

She has offered diversity training on campus to cadets and staff and in the Lexington community, where she has met with members of the Lexington Police Department.

VMI cadets, Love says, have been overwhelmingly positive about diversity training, where she’s been asked about everything from the meaning of the Confederate flag to race relations. She says exercises to help cadets “understand their own identity” and interact with their peers have been an important part of her work.

As if to put an exclamation point on VMI’s efforts to become a more diverse community — appointing its first Black superintendent and first diversity officer — the Corps of Cadets now has its first female regimental commander.

Some cadets complained anonymously about her appointment on a social media app, according to news reports, but 22-year-old Kasey Meredith says her promotion to VMI’s top cadet was about hard work, not checking a box.

“It’s easy to look at it from an outside perspective and say, ‘Wow, this worked perfectly,’ put the pieces together and make it look like VMI was doing the right thing,” says Meredith, whose mother served four years in the Navy and an additional two years in the Army reserves.

As for Meredith, she’s joining the Marines after graduation, she says, “because I wanted to do the toughest thing for myself.”

At a glance

Founded

America’s oldest state-supported military college, VMI was founded in 1839 in Lexington. It also has the nation’s largest ROTC program. The college admitted its first Black cadets in 1968. Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision, women were admitted in 1997, making VMI the last U.S. military college to enroll women. Approximately 50% to 60% of graduates take a commission in armed forces, and about 18% make the military a career.

Campus

VMI’s 200-acre campus consists of 59 buildings, many of which date to the 19th century. Its Old Barracks is recognized as a national historic landmark. VMI also owns several off-post properties, including McKethan Park — the site of the VMI observatory — the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, the Jackson House Museum and the adjoining Davidson-Tucker House in downtown Lexington.

Enrollment

Undergraduate: 1,652

In-state: 1,035 (62.7%)

International: 28

Students of color: 392 (24.1%)

Female: 13%

Male: 87%

Employees

156 administrative and professional staff

146 full-time faculty

65 adjunct faculty

Tuition, fees, housing and
financial aid

In-state: $30,0321

Out-of-state: $58,686¹

Average financial aid debt held
by graduates: $20,582

1 Includes room and board and quartermaster charges.
Statistics are based on fall 2021 data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Select Region or Brand

Upcoming Event

byline: Gary Robertson

Shoring up

Using teamwork

New and old attractions

Into the present

Historic Triangle at a glance

After the crisis

Class conflicts

JMU at a glance

Upward mobility

ODU at a glance

Stairway to heaven

Work it out

A new outlook

Home improvement

PROFILE

The Royals of Regent

Virtual reach

Political influence

Legal precedents

At a glance

On the line