Josiah Bunting III

Josiah Bunting III
Josiah Bunting III
	Bunting speaks at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in 2011.
Born	November 8, 1939 (age 84); Haverford, Pennsylvania
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	1966 –1972
Rank	Major
Unit	9th Infantry Division
Other work	Author

Josiah Bunting III (born November 8, 1939) is an American educator. He has been a military officer, college president, and an author and speaker on education and Western culture. Bunting is married and has four adult children. His half-brother is Dick Ebersol, the creator and former executive producer of Saturday Night Live; Ebersol and Bunting have the same mother.^[1]

Background[edit]

Josiah Bunting was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and the Salisbury School in Connecticut, but was expelled from both institutions for playing pranks.^[2] He then entered the U.S. Marine Corps. Bunting went on to Virginia Military Institute where he graduated third in his class as an English major, and was elected to a Rhodes scholarship to attend the University of Oxford, where he received an M.A. and also served as president of the American Students Association. He entered the United States Army in 1966. After six years of service, he reached the rank of Major. He was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Vietnam; and West Point, where he was assistant professor of history and social sciences.

Bunting's 1972 novel The Lionheads was a scathing account based on his experiences as an officer of the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968. The novel's main antagonist, General Lemming, was based heavily on the commanding general, Julian Ewell.^[3]

The July 28, 1972 issue of LIFE magazine included a profile written by Thomas Moore of then Major Bunting examining his decision to leave West Point because of his desire to "disassociate [himself] from the active implementation of [the Army's] policy in Vietnam..." In the article Bunting also stated that he favored a "citizen draft and civilian control over the military" and that he didn't "want to see that son of a bitch who grows up in Greenwich, Conn., goes off to Yale and becomes a member of the Skull and Bones get out of doing some sort of national service." Bunting served on the faculty of the Naval War College for a year in 1973–74.^[4]

Bunting served as president of Briarcliff College, and later as president of Hampden–Sydney College from 1977 to 1987. He was also the headmaster of The Lawrenceville School near Princeton, New Jersey from 1987 to 1995. Notably, Lawrenceville is the archrival of Bunting's former high school, The Hill School. At Hampden–Sydney he revitalized the English composition or Rhetoric Program, enhanced the Western Civilization program, then called Western Man, making it more interdisciplinary. He also spearheaded the Campaign for Hampden-Sydney, a capital campaign that nearly tripled the college's endowment.

Bunting was appointed Superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute in 1995 and served until 2003. At VMI, he served as Professor of Humanities. He was responsible for overseeing preparations for and the enrollment of VMI's first female cadets. He was openly opposed to allowing women to attend VMI, calling the 1997 decision in United States v. Virginia which struck down VMI's male-only admittance policy a "savage disappointment."^[5]

Bunting is also a member of the UNESCO Commission and of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

In 2004, Bunting was appointed chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

In 2007, Bunting was appointed president of ISI's Lehrman American Studies Center.

In 2015, Bunting was appointed Chairman of the Friends Of the National World War II Memorial.^[6]

Books[edit]

Nonfiction[edit]

Small Units in the Control of Civil Disorder (1967)
Ulysses S. Grant (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2004), part of the American Presidents series (ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.)
The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall (Knopf, 2024)

Novels[edit]

The Lionheads selected one of the Ten Best Novels of 1973 by Time magazine.
The Advent of Frederick Giles (1974).
An Education for Our Time (Regnery, 1998), a work describing a "dying billionaire's detailed vision of a new, ideal college", was a main selection of the Conservative Book Club in 1998.
All Loves Excelling (Bridge Works, 2001), set in a boarding school.