Longwood taps West Point general as new president

A general who is the chief academic officer for the U.S. Military Academy has been named the next president of Longwood University.

Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the academic board at West Point since 2005, was unanimously selected by the board of visitors yesterday to be Longwood's 25th president. He will succeed Patricia P. Cormier, who will step down June 30 after 14 years as Longwood president.

"I'm not going to go there as a general," said Finnegan, who will retire from the Army before taking the top spot at Longwood. "I'm going to go as a university president."

A 1971 West Point graduate, Finnegan earned a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

He said he will continue on the course set by Cormier to raise the profile of Longwood.

"It's a great school that people don't know about," he said.

Finnegan, who is responsible for the academic program for 4,400 cadets at West Point, said he sees "some amazing parallels with Longwood," a public university with about 4,800 students in Farmville.

About half of West Point cadets receive their degrees in the humanities, he noted. "We do liberal arts in the classic sense of the term," he said.

The two schools also have similar missions, he said.

"At West Point, we take diverse young Americans and train them to be better than they were," he said. Longwood also seeks to create citizen leaders, "and that's what we do at West Point."

Finnegan, 60, was one of four finalists who met with students, faculty and staff last month during a series of campus forums. During his Feb. 11 visit, he said he has "been a soldier, a lawyer, an educator and a leader," and he has seen the difference an education makes.

Longwood Rector Helen Warriner-Burke said 124 candidates sought the presidency. Finnegan was the top choice because of his broad range of professional experience in higher education, she said.

Before being named dean of the academic board, Finnegan was professor and head of West Point's department of law, and his military assignments have included serving as principal legal adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and deploying to the Persian Gulf during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

"I've loved what I've done for the last four decades," he said.

He said he feels he is leaving one dream job for another. "This opportunity was simply too wonderful to pass up."

He and his wife, Joan, have two daughters and four grandchildren. The couple now live in a town in New York that is about half the size of Farmville with not nearly as much development, he said. Highland Falls is about the same distance from New York City as Farmville is from Richmond.

"We have fallen in love with the community," Finnegan said of Farmville.

His return to Virginia will be a homecoming of sorts. He taught at the Army's Judge Advocate General's School at the U.Va. law school and has a law license from the Virginia State Bar.

His wife is a registered nurse licensed to practice in Virginia. Two of his brothers live in Richmond, including Daniel P. Finnegan, a senior editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Karin Kapsidelis is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.