A Few Good Men
On a chilly evening in September 2020, Jordan Schumacher solemnly patrolled the grounds of Valley Forge Military Academy, near his wit’s end. Weeks earlier, the school’s top brass had elevated the 20-year-old college sophomore to the highest rank available to cadets—first captain. A former Boy Scout who’d joined a junior ROTC program at age 11, he was proud of the promotion and ready to lead. But as he navigated the school’s toxic environment in his new role, he’d been feeling increasingly helpless and depressed. Entrusting students in leadership roles was all well and good, but a dearth of healthy adult oversight and accountability had contributed to a culture replete with assaults, verbal abuse, hazing, and sexual violence that had resulted in police visits, lawsuits, and a cold war pitting recalcitrant trustees and administrators against reform-minded parents, alumni, and cadets. Out on patrol that night, Schumacher told me, he felt on “the brink of darkness.”
The Forge, as insiders call it, resembles a cross between an East Coast prep school and a military installation. Its 100-acre campus is dotted with dormitories and academic buildings, but also with a war memorial, an obstacle course, and a parade field for drill formations. Nestled 20 miles north of Philadelphia, the private institution teaches middle school, high school, and junior college students. Some graduate as commissioned military officers, but all are subject to the customs and courtesies of military life, as well as its trials and traumas.
With school leaders doing little to address the fraught campus atmosphere, Schumacher had taken it upon himself to patrol the grounds as often as possible. This evening, walking along a mossy brick pathway, he spotted something suspicious: Behind a storage shed, out of sight of campus surveillance cameras, a group of upperclassmen was tormenting a few shivering plebes. He’d stumbled upon an unsanctioned version of the “cap shield” exam, an induction rite wherein new students are quizzed on the Forge’s nearly 100-year history. The exam is the culmination of a boot camp of sorts for incoming college students. Those who pass are welcomed into the Corps of Cadets, which Schumacher now commanded, and rewarded with the cap shield medal, a brass badge depicting the mythical moment when General George Washington, standing on the Pennsylvania battleground for which the school was named, prayed for the survival of the fledgling American republic.
Schumacher had arrived on campus in 2019, excited by the Forge’s time-honored traditions and drawn to its curricula on counterterrorism and cybersecurity. A stocky history nerd with dark brown hair, he spent hours memorizing school trivia and passed his cap shield exam in near-record time. But he soon came to see the exam as an empty ritual. It revolved around lofty principles, yet often culminated in a “cap shield handshake,” wherein plebes point the prick of the badge toward their palm and accept a vigorous clasp. A minor stabbing, perhaps, but telling of more extreme hazing that campus leaders seemed willing to tolerate, and sometimes even take part in.
When Schumacher disrupted the hazing session, the plebes were relieved, the bullies annoyed. Afterward, one emailed him a screed claiming he lacked the traits of a US Marine. “That pissed me off,” Schumacher recalls. “These cadets were clearly out of line. They had the wrong idea of what service and tradition really are.” But he was even more frustrated with the school for creating an environment in which college kids were saddled with responsibilities beyond their age and experience. Cadets were meant to be supported by adult TAC (teach, advise, counsel) officers, many of whom are military veterans. Yet in recent years, Forge administrators had laid off some of the best TACs and replaced them with less-enlightened ones. “We were no longer
