Message from the Chairman of the VMI

Message from the VMI Alumni Agencies Board Chairman and Keydet Club President

Gerald J. “Jerry” Acuff Jr. ’71

On June 30, 2021, my term as president of the VMI Keydet Club will expire, as will my tenure as the chairman of the VMI Alumni Agencies Board of Directors. On that day, too, I will close 15 years of service to the Institute, its cadets, and the rest of the members of the VMI family—alumni, parents, faculty, staff, and friends—through the VMI Alumni Agencies. I am deeply grateful and humbled for this opportunity, because it allowed me to do what so many alumni want to do: Repay in some manner the debt we owe the Institute for the remarkable experience that allowed us to pursue lives of success, service, and consequence.

The work the Alumni Agencies does every day is critical to the success of VMI, and I am thankful for every employee of the Agencies who does it. They work to secure the private financial support that the Institute needs to maintain its progress and build the endowments that support every aspect of VMI’s extraordinary education. They engage with alumni, family, and friends to strengthen their bonds with each other and with the Institute and the Corps of Cadets. They perform the vital administrative and financial functions that underpin the Agencies’ work on behalf of the entire VMI family, and they maintain an energetic communications effort that keeps the VMI family engaged, informed, and inspired. In their work, these men and women consistently display a high level of professionalism and an unshakeable devotion to the Institute.

I must express my thanks to Steve Maconi, VMI Alumni Agencies chief executive officer; Sam Stocks ’90, VMI Alumni Association president and my successor as chairman of the Agencies board; and Steve Hupp ’84, VMI Foundation president who, like me, will close out a decade and a half of service June 30. We have spent countless hours working together to ensure that the Agencies continued to work as one team, fully aware of the true interdependence required to ensure that the Agencies executes their important missions of supporting the Institute’s faculty, staff, and cadets; helping our alumni succeed; and binding the VMI family ever closer in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Each of these men has made considerable contributions to the work of the Agencies—and thus the future of the Institute—and given so much of that most precious commodity, their time, to that work. I deeply appreciate their service to the Institute, and I am proud and grateful to have worked with them.

Lastly, my service with the VMI Alumni Agencies has provided me many opportunities to meet our cadets and our younger alumni. Without exception, I have come away from these encounters moved by the incomparable quality of these young people. As it has since its founding, our VMI continues to send into the world graduates of strong character and rock-solid integrity, graduates shaped by a world-class academic program, superb athletic opportunities, and a matchless co-curriculum—graduates who have a service-oriented approach to life and a burning desire to provide honorable leadership in their careers, their communities, our country, and our world. Put another way, we still make them the old-fashioned way.

VMI needs all of us—alumni, parents, and friends—to continue our support of the Institute in whatever way we can, because doing so will ensure the continued success of this unique and wonderful college at which a very special breed of young people is educated and prepared for life as citizen-soldiers.