NORFOLK, Va. _ Eastern Virginia Medical School will investigate how racist photographs got into its yearbooks over decades, not just the 1984 edition featuring Gov. Ralph Northam as a student.
Dr. Richard V. Homan, president and provost of the school, said the probes, including one by an outside law firm, also will examine the broader campus culture.
"We need to have an open and transparent process to be able to make sure that we know what happened _ what was lacking at the time _ so history doesn't repeat itself," Homan said Tuesday. "And then also understand where we are today."
Homan and the EVMS Board of Visitors have hired Richard Cullen, a former Virginia attorney general and past U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to lead the external review. School spokesmen weren't immediately able to disclose the cost of the contract with Cullen's firm, McGuire Woods.
Additionally, the board has created a community-based advisory board, headed by Gilbert Bland, president and CEO of the Urban League of Hampton Roads. Other members will be announced as they are appointed over the coming days.
The panel's purpose is to review past yearbooks, determine what the process was for publishing those volumes and find out whether there was any faculty or staff members involved. It will then hand over its findings to Cullen for further review.
Homan said the panel and law firm's work could take "several weeks or months" to complete. He declined to comment on whether the investigations will seek to determine if the photograph that appeared on Northam's yearbook page was related to an EVMS event.
On Friday, the Democratic governor came under scrutiny when a photo in his section of the yearbook showed two people in racist costumes, one wearing blackface and the other in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. Northam apologized for "the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo," but then said in a news conference the next day he did not believe he was in it.
Despite calls for his resignation, he has refused to step down.
Over the weekend, EVMS hired communications consultant Doug Sosnik, who once served as a White House strategist for former President Bill Clinton, to help the institution deal with the flood of attention. The Board of Visitors held a meeting Monday to discuss, among other issues related to the yearbook controversy, its media strategy.
EVMS did not send notification of the meeting to The Virginian-Pilot.
Homan revealed during the meeting, which was reported by The Washington Post, that he discontinued the yearbook in 2013, after Mekbib Gemeda, his vice president of diversity and inclusion, informed him of students wearing Confederate garb in that year's volume. The pictures appeared as the in-line portraits of three medical students, with Confederate flags behind them.
Until that time, Homan, who joined the school in 2012, said he didn't know a yearbook existed.
"That crossed the line enough for me to say, 'No more yearbooks,'" he told the Pilot during a separate interview Monday evening, describing the portraits as "incendiary" and "breathtaking."
Gemeda gave the three students cultural-sensitivity training, Homan said. None of the three former students could be reached for comment by the Pilot on Monday.
In hindsight, Homan said, he regrets not having reviewed previous years' volumes.
Since Northam's yearbook images went public Friday, Homan said he hasn't been in communication with either Northam or his staff. Vincent Rhodes, a school spokesman, said the only contact his communications team has had with the governor's office was Saturday morning, when two members of Northam's staff came to campus to see a copy of the yearbook.
"We're a public institution," Homan said. "We're not political."
