Nineteen years ago the United States Military Academy celebrated its bicentennial. Thomas Jefferson founded the academy in 1802 for a school for engineers, using a post established in the revolutionary war, as the grounds of the new school.  Eighty seven years later, Col. Charles Jefferson Wright, a Civil War Veteran, followed Jefferson’s vision and established the New York Military Academy less than ten miles away from West Point.  Wright’s academy was founded in an old hotel, the Glen Ridge House, in Cornwall-on-Hudson and his goal was “to provide a place where boys and young men might pursue their studies while living under the benefits of a carefully planned military system.”  NYMA was to provide a solid education while teaching its cadets to be citizen leaders.  I am often asked if students from NYMA go directly to our service academies or into the armed services?  No, that wasn’t the founders intent. While Cadet Avaras might enter the Navy and Cadet Tyron is aiming to follow in his sister’s footsteps and go to West Point, and Cadet Zhou is deciding on either the University of Washington or NYU.  Each one of them will go their own way, leaving NYMA as leaders, just as Col. Wright had hoped having gained from his academy pride in their accomplishments which put them one step ahead, as Col. Wright said, “in the duties and responsibilities of civil life.”

-Christine C. McDonald, Dean of Academics