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Dear VMI Community:
With the health and well-being of our cadets, faculty, staff, and local community in mind and based on guidance from our public health partners, we are implementing the following changes to VMI operations.
VMI has cancelled all on-Post academic instruction. Beginning on Wednesday, March 25, 2020, classes will move to distance learning environment and will continue until at least Friday, April 17, 2020. Cadets will not report to post until further notice. If a cadet has extenuating circumstances that requires barracks housing during this time, requests will be considered on a case by case basis. Details on barracks housing will be forthcoming.
During this period of distance learning, cadets will still be expected to uphold the core tenets of being a VMI cadet – honor, integrity, physical fitness, and self-discipline. The honor code and other academic regulations will continue to be enforced.
VMI faculty have been working since Wednesday to develop plans for delivering instruction in a distance learning environment that continues to provide our cadets with the rigorous and challenging curriculum for which VMI is known. Faculty have been given license to develop a plan that is suitable to the unique nature of each course and the cadets who are enrolled. Each plan for online instruction will be approved by the department head and the dean of the faculty. If a faculty member has chosen to provide synchronous (live) instruction, that instruction will occur at the usual time designated for that class period (Eastern Daylight Time). Cadets are able to access asynchronous instruction on their schedule and based on the instructor’s direction. Cadets must continue to regularly check their VMI email and Canvas accounts for updates from their professors.
There are still many questions to answer regarding cadet life, academics, and operations. I ask for your patience as our faculty and staff are working around the clock to implement these changes and prepare for the many questions that will be raised. We will communicate more specifics early next week.
This is a challenging time for everyone. We realize that many of these decisions have a lasting impact on the future of our cadets beyond their immediate health and well-being. VMI is committed to providing a quality education regardless of the situation at hand and will work with each cadet based on their unique circumstances. This is not unprecedented in VMI’s history but it is unlike anything we have seen in our lifetime. But there is no place in the country whose people are more prepared for such adversity than VMI.
Very respectfully,
J.H. Binford Peay, III ‘62
General, U.S. Army (Retired)
Superintendent
VMI uses the term 'post' rather than 'campus' and 'furlough' rather than 'spring break,' reflecting its military character
Lane B flip 2026-10-12: full text of Superintendent Peay's March 13, 2020 'Dear VMI Community' letter recovered from VMI's official Coronavirus Updates 'Previous Communications' archive via Wayback capture 20200420140856 (live 404). Replaced the 397-character reconstruction, which had attributed to March 13 the remainder-of-semester and do-not-retrieve-belongings instructions that the archive dates to the March 20, 2020 Chief of Staff message; the March 13 letter itself moves classes to distance learning from March 25 until at least April 17 and tells cadets not to report to post until further notice. The archive's date heading is carried in timestampApprox and the unsupported clock-time timestamp was dropped. Two annotations describing reconstruction content were removed. Channel left as email: the record does not show delivery.