Josiah Bunting, III was appointed Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute effective August 1, 1995. Bunting, a leading educator for over two decades, is the thirteenth Superintendent of VMI. He was commissioned a Major General in the Virginia Militia.   General Bunting was promoted to Lieutenant General, effective 1 October 2002.

General Bunting, a 1963 VMI graduate, left his position as headmaster of the Lawrenceville School, an independent boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. He had been at Lawrenceville School since 1987, following a ten-year tenure as President of Hampden-Sydney College. Prior to that time, he served as President of Briarcliff College, a women's college in Briarcliff, New York, from 1973 to 1977.

As a cadet at VMI, General Bunting exemplified the qualities which would lead to his successful career in education. He rose through the cadet ranks to become Regimental Commander and First Captain of the Corps, was a member of the Honor Court and captain of the swimming team. An English major, he graduated third in his class and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

After receiving a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford, where he was President of the American Students Association, he entered the United States Army in 1966. During six years of service, he reached the rank of Major, with duty stations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Vietnam (Ninth Infantry Division); and West Point, New York, where he was an assistant professor of history and social sciences at the United States Military Academy. His military citations include the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Army Commendation Medal, Vietnam Honor Medal - 2nd class, Presidential Unit Citation, Parachute Badge, Combat Infantry Badge, and Ranger Tab.

General Bunting spent a year at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island before being named President at Briarcliff. During that year he was professor and acting head of the Department of Strategy, and he finished the last year of a three-year fellowship in the Department of History at Columbia University.

An accomplished author, he has been published many times. His novel, The Lionheads was selected one of the Ten Best Novels of 1973 by Time Magazine. It has been re-published several times and has been translated into fifteen languages. In addition he published Small Units in the Control of Civil Disorder (1967) and The Advent of Frederick Giles (1974).

General Bunting's third novel, An Education for Our Time (Regnery, 1998), outlines in a series of letters and will provisions a dying billionaire's detailed vision of a new, ideal college, to be opened in 2000 in the Laramie Mountains of Wyoming. It was a main selection of the Conservative Book Club in 1998. His novel All Loves Excelling (Bridge Works, 2001), is set in an upstate New York boarding school. The book chronicles the last year in the life of a senior girl at the school - a victim of misshapen parental ambition and of a school for whom students have become dehumanized units of calculation, prestige, and measurement. It is a savage commentary on the culture of today's elite boarding schools and the casualties of that culture. The paperback edition will be published this Fall (2002) by The Berkley Publishing Group. He has also edited new editions of Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (Gateway, 1997) and John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University (Gateway, 1999).

A sought-after lecturer who holds honorary degrees from several colleges, General Bunting is a member of numerous honor societies and fraternities and has been a trustee of many educational institutions and entities. He has been president of Phi Beta Kappa at the College of William and Mary (1993-1996). He is a trustee of the George C. Marshall Research Foundation (since 1980) and the Guggenheim Foundation (since 1986), and a former trustee of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars. He also serves as a Director of the Owens and Minor Corporation in Richmond, Virginia, and of the Conserve School, a new, experimental institution based in part on several guiding principles of An Education for Our Time. At Hampden-Sydney, he taught five courses in English, and at The Lawrenceville School he taught a course in Leadership in Democratic Societies. At VMI, he is Professor of Humanities and has taught a history course in Democracies at War, an English course in Prose of the Victorian period, and a political science seminar entitled "Political and Military Leadership."

Early in his tenure he was charged by the Institute's governing board with implementing the ruling of the United States Supreme Court, to overseeing preparations for and the enrollment of female cadet.

General Bunting is married to the former Diana Margaret Cunningham of Lima, Peru. They have four children: two sons, Josiah IV and Charles (VMI '01) and two daughters, Elizabeth and Alexandra.

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VMI Public Relations Office
April 2002