Since its inception at the turn of the century, the U. S. Naval Postgraduate School has made a subtle and continuing contribution to the technical strength of the Navy through the opportunity for advanced engineering education that it has provided for the officer corps of the Navy. For almost two decades, the school has been embarked on a well-ordered program to broaden the maturity and scope of its in-house educational resources, abandoning its principal prewar function of preparing officers for further work at civilian institutions. Now, in the early 1960s, the Postgraduate School has emerged as a first-line graduate engineering school of professionally recognized caliber, with steadily increasing competence in the subsidiary fields of management, the humanities, and professional naval subjects.
The need for additional officer education beyond that obtained at the Naval Academy was first felt, quite naturally, in the then burgeoning field of marine engineering. In exploring methods to cope with this increasing need, the old Bureau of Engineering in 1904 began to conduct a special course in marine engineering for selected officers. The success of this course at the Bureau achieved formal recognition in 1909 when the Secretary of the Navy directed that this “postgraduate” instruction be conducted at the Naval Academy.
In 1912, the Postgraduate Department of the U. S. Naval Academy was formally created, charged with the responsibility of conducting this instruction of small groups of selected officers in advanced aspects of marine engineering, using facilities at the Academy and at the Naval Experimental Station in Annapolis. As one traces the history of the Postgraduate School, it is well to remember that it sprang directly from the technological needs of the Navy itself. It did not result from recommendations of an outside agency or an ad hoc committee.
Three civilian professors comprised the first faculty of the newly organized Postgraduate Department. The salaries of two were paid on a rather tenuous basis from funds set aside for visiting lecturers. The third was carried on the civil service rolls at the Naval Experimental Station. By 1915, faculty appointments were properly authorized, and a faculty of six was engaged in instructing small postgraduate groups in marine engineering. The years 1915-1917 saw an enlargement of the department’s repertoire to include advanced instruction in three additional subjects: ordnance, civil engineering, and naval construction.
Operation of the Postgraduate Department was suspended during World War I. The department was revived immediately after the Armistice, its first postwar department head being Captain Ernest J. King. Quarters for the department, which had been in Isherwood Hall at the Academy, were established in the old Marine Barracks building on the north side of the Academy grounds, at which time the Postgraduate Department became the Postgraduate School. Curricula in mechanical and electrical engineering were added at this time. A few years later, radio and aerological engineering were added.
It was during this period that the Postgraduate School established liaison with many leading universities and colleges throughout the country as arrangements were made for students to go from the Postgraduate School to these institutions to continue their educations, with opportunities to earn advanced degrees in selected engineering fields. The growth of this “away” program established as one of the early primary functions of the Postgraduate School the providing of so-called “warming-up” or preparatory courses for its students, courses that would be completed at those institutions that were strong in the particular fields selected.
In 1927, a step important to the conceptual ordering of naval officer education was taken when a General Line School was established within the Postgraduate School. Implementation of this step established the capability of the Postgraduate School to provide advanced study in subjects of purely professional concern, endeavoring to build on the experience gained in an officer’s first sea tour. This capability continued in the Postgraduate School at Annapolis until the opening of World War II, when general line training was suspended.
The role of the Postgraduate School in the decade of the 1930s was clearly defined in a plan issued by the Bureau of Navigation in its Circular Letter No. 86-31 dated 29 December 1931:
The plan for officer education contemplates that eventually all line officers shall take the General Line course at the Postgraduate School, when ordered to their first tour of shore duty.
The basis of this plan is that every line officer, while maintaining a thorough general knowledge of the Naval profession, shall have a special knowledge of at least one branch of that profession.
From the officers who complete the one year General Line course, there will be selected a limited number of officers for a year’s postgraduate training at the Postgraduate School, in a prescribed speciality, with the idea of developing them as operating specialists. Either from this group or from the original group, there will be chosen a small number of design and production specialists in each branch who will have, in addition to the second year of postgraduate work, a third year of instruction at a civil university.
This plan envisioned a student load of 250 officers annually for the school. From these instructions it is clear that the concept of subspecialization has long been a part of Navy personnel planning.
Operation within the bounds of the plan of Circular Letter 86-31 became impractical, as it became apparent that the time required for a proper engineering education made serious inroads on the cherished goal of General Line training for all. By the late 1930s the policy had been adopted, and candidates were forewarned that they would follow two curricula concurrently during the first year at the Postgraduate School. Only a small group would follow the General Line curriculum alone. This group would consist of student officers who would not be considered further for technical instruction. The Postgraduate School reflected this division of effort during this period by dividing itself into two parts, a School of the Line and a Technical School.
During this same period of the 1930s, the Navy’s growing postgraduate program for officers began to embrace non-engineering subjects such as law, finance, supply, and business administration. Several curricula in these areas were established that were conducted completely at civilian institutions, with all curricula contents and student assignments controlled and co-ordinated by the Postgraduate School at Annapolis. Selection of students to postgraduate courses was accomplished according to the following method outlined in a 1937 catalogue:
(a) Prior to the meeting of the Board in Washington, the Postgraduate School is furnished with a list of the candidates that are to be considered by the Board.
(b) The Postgraduate School compiles, for the consideration of the Board, lists of candidates, by groups, arranged in order of priority based on the following four factors—first, the candidate’s choice; second, his record, which shows his service experience; third, his mark in mathematics at the Naval Academy; and fourth, his class standing.
(c) From these lists the Board selects the officers to be ordered to the Postgraduate School, in accordance with the quota for the second year’s instruction for each speciality.
(d) The results of the selection by the Board are published so that the prospective student officers may know, well in advance, what curriculum they are to follow.
The wisdom of ancient ways shows itself in the importance attached to the candidate’s mathematics aptitude. The indicated procedure of the Postgraduate School helping to pick its own students is no longer operative. Today selection is made by the Bureau of Personnel based on officer postgraduate curricula preferences indicated on the submitted officer preference and personal information cards (NAVPERS 2774).
World War II forced a discontinuation of the School of the Line function at Annapolis and a shortening of the curricula in the Technical School. Additional technical courses were instituted to train reserve officers in certain specialized skills. During these war years the scope of the school’s activities increased significantly and the staff enlarged from 34 to 73. Considerable continuity of faculty strength was maintained during the war years; many of the instructors took commissions as officers in the Naval Reserve, continuing in a duty status in their faculty positions.
The postwar decade 1945-1955 was a period of profound change for the Postgraduate School, both as to its physical plant and the scope of its academic mission. The advent of radar and nuclear weapons during World War II were in the forefront of a revolution of military and naval technology that demanded a greater intensification of advanced technical education for officers. With a postgraduate officer education system well-integrated into its personnel structure, the Navy met postwar technical escalation with an escalation in the role of the School and its functions.
A succession of permissive Congressional legislative acts hallmarked the postwar metamorphosis of the school. The first, in 1945, authorized the Superintendent (then the Superintendent of the Naval Academy, of which the Postgraduate School was a part) to grant bachelors of science, masters, and doctors degrees in engineering and related fields. With this in-house capability to grant advanced degrees now authorized, the school had license to develop the faculty competence and physical plant necessary to conduct full- fledged graduate technical curricula entirely at the school. Thus, the school’s traditional role of “warming-up” students for other institutions was supplemented by what has come to be its major function, that of conducting a substantial in-house graduate program that encompasses a broad range of technical subjects. Students still go to other institutions when the needs of a particular field of endeavor are best served by another institution.
In 1946, an important step toward giving proper status to the faculty, with its significantly increased mission, was accomplished with the establishment of the position of civilian Academic Dean at the school.
In 1947, the Postgraduate School was taken out from under the administrative skirts of the Naval Academy at Annapolis and, with its own Superintendent, became a separate activity. Under the aegis of the new Superintendent were placed, in addition to the Engineering School at Annapolis, the Intelligence School in Washington, D. C., and the two General Line Schools that had been created since the war, one at Newport in 1946 and the other at Monterey in 1948. These latter two schools picked up the thread of professional officer education that had been dropped as a school formality with the demise of the School of the Line at the beginning of World War II. Admittedly conducting professional education at a lower key than the pre-war School of the Line, the new line schools began to provide necessary professional background to hundreds of officers who came into the Navy during the war from other than the Naval Academy or the NROTC, officers who had not had the formal opportunity to be conversant with the broad spectrum of professional knowledge required for general line service.
The next big postwar step for the Postgraduate School was its move in the winter of 1951-1952 from its old quarters in the former Marine Barracks at Annapolis to the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California. The Del Monte, a gracious resort hotel during the early 1900s, had been taken over by the Navy during World War II to house naval flight and radio technician trainees. With its extensive and beautiful grounds and its existing nucleus of buildings situated in the unique climatic and cultural atmosphere of the Monterey Peninsula, the hotel represented an attractive answer to the Postgraduate School’s pressing need for more room in which to conduct its significantly increasing scope of operations. With the Monterey General Line School already functioning in the hotel, the Engineering School temporarily established itself in the hotel and several temporary Butler huts while a complex of five modern laboratory and classroom buildings was constructed. These buildings, which have since won an architectural award for their beauty and functionality, were first occupied by new classes in the summer of 1954.
No account of this first decade of major postwar change for the Postgraduate School would be complete without acknowledging the devotion and leadership of its two Superintendents during this period. Rear Admiral Herman A. Spanagel, an early alumnus of the School who went on to study metallurgy at Lehigh University, served as Superintendent during the period of greatest change, June 1944 through June 1950. It was during this period that the Congressional legislation was enacted and implemented that established the framework for the postwar growth of the school. Rear Admiral Ernest Edward Herrmann showed great wisdom and tact as Superintendent from 1950 to 1952 in leading the school and faculty west to Monterey, and successfully amalgamating the Postgraduate School into the fabric of life on the Monterey Peninsula. He passed on to his successors a command consisting of the old Annapolis Engineering School, the Monterey General Line School, and the school’s administrative command.
In January 1957, another school was added with the establishment of the Management School. Meanwhile, the postwar input of officers to the General Line program had dwindled, necessitating the closing of the General Line School at Newport. Concurrently a new mission evolved for the Monterey General Line School in the form of a bachelor of science program that was established in July 1958. The input for this program was to come from those naval aviators and other young officers whose college education had been interrupted by flight training and commissioned service. Many of these officers had been promised five more terms of college by the Navy. Thus, a broadening of the scope of the General Line Program at Monterey was undertaken to satisfy this need. The General Line School’s name was changed to the General Line and Naval Science School, a capability in the humanities was established, and arrangements were made for instruction in technical subjects by Engineering School professors.
The final chapter in Postgraduate School organization was accomplished in the summer of 1962 when, based on its own internally generated study, the school abolished the administratively autonomous Engineering, Management, and General Line and Naval Science Schools, reorganizing these old elements along a one-school, one-faculty concept. This step represents returning almost full cycle to the basic one school concept initially spelled out in the Bureau of Navigation Circular Letter No. 86-31, except that now the organization has to co-ordinate the execution of a vastly enlarged mission whose most important element is a diverse graduate level education program. This organization along functional academic and administrative lines should do much to bolster the acadenic standards and depth of instruction for the undergraduate and non-technical curricula.
The postwar growth of the Postgraduate School to a position of full academic stature is now essentially complete. Future phases of change will be phases of consolidation and broadening. The motive forces that result in the success of any academic institution are generated within its faculty, for within the competence of the faculty lies the means of acquiring knowledge, the fulfillment of which is the institution’s sole reason for being. Thus it is that the Postgraduate School’s greatest strength is its faculty, a group that has increased considerably in size since the war. As a hallmark of the faculty’s quality, almost all of the new members who have joined since World War II possess doctorates. Today this faculty represents a very capable and energetic resource, fully able to conduct the broad regime of instruction and research necessary to a mature graduate education.
The principal reason that the prewar concept of only a “warming-up” role for the school had to be abandoned is that such a goal, academically speaking, made a truncated, unnatural process out of trying to conduct advanced instruction at the school. Survey rather than detailed knowledge was emphasized to satisfy the “warming-up” mission. This meant that attracting the best available men to the faculty was difficult, since the school did not offer the full challenge of an integrated graduate course of instruction.
Examining the role of fundamental research at the school reveals the interplay between progressive and reactionary elements during the period of postwar growth of the school. Notwithstanding that the processes of graduate education and basic research have long been closely associated and reinforce each other in many ways, a remnant of the past survived in the 1957 school regulations: “ . . . Research is not a primary function of the Postgraduate School and therefore, the scope of research activity shall be kept within limits as outlined herein.”
It was only after several years of effort that members of the faculty were able to establish research as a full and necessary partner in the school’s graduate education process. Today the Postgraduate School’s official mission explicitly concludes with “ ... in support of the foregoing, to foster and encourage a program of research in order to sustain academic excellence.”
In support of this mission the Postgraduate School sponsors research in many fundamental areas of science, with generous support by the Office of Naval Research and other elements of government. Facilities at Monterey for the conduct of this research include a 2 Mev Van de Graaff accelerator, a small nuclear reactor, anechoic chambers, six-inch and 12-inch Varian electromagnets, a helium liquefier, advanced plasma and spectroscopic equipment, an extensive servomechanisms laboratory, and several fast digital computers. This vigorous research activity at the Postgraduate School constitutes the real touchstone of its maturity.
Although a full-fledged graduate academic institution, the Postgraduate School has a unique character. It is a naval school. The Army has no counterpart, and the Air Force’s Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson, with its later start in life, is not a school of comparable academic or physical depth. The uniqueness of the Postgraduate School stems from the character of its student body, which is composed of military officers several years older, on the average, than their civilian academic contemporaries, men who have three to ten years of active military experience behind them. This background obviously introduces the basis for a different type of student-teacher relationship than is normally found in colleges. The maturity of Postgraduate School students represents an important plus factor that contributes a degree of stability and purpose to the school’s academic life that many regular universities lack.
Just as was the case of the role of research, there are other vestiges of the past that the Postgraduate School must shed as it consolidates its new postwar status. Thus, the “warming-up” heritage of the school’s prewar role lingers on in the established course arrangements and day to day pace of activities at the school. These older ways of doing business constitute a difficult framework in which to conduct full-throw graduate education. In particular, the older heritage calls for too many different courses to be taught at the school, with too many separate curricula available. The student work load in terms of contact hours is too heavy. Lastly, the school’s academic year of four ten-week terms artificially divides and hurries the presentation of material for which most other graduate schools find the semester system a more optimum teaching vehicle.
The first difficulty, that of too many courses and curricula being offered at the school, stems from the pressures exerted by another heritage of the past, that of curricula traditionally being generated and controlled from each of several naval administrative offices with only limited advisory faculty help. Thus, the school has curricula in aeronautical engineering, electronics and communications engineering, naval engineering, ordnance engineering, meteorology, and a one-year science program. All of the engineering curricula have several sub-divisions. While these curricula reflect the old order of sponsoring technical bureaus (BuOrd, Bu- Ships, BuAer, etc.) they cut across the great underlying currents of academic unity and kinship that exist among all the applied and pure sciences. These are to a large extent unities of common mathematical method and exposition and basic understanding of the electronic, atomic, and thermodynamic nature of things. Too many curricula artificially and deleteriously compartmentalize knowledge. They proliferate by creating too many courses, which introduces a basis for a teaching redundancy between departments and hence a loss of efficiency in instruction.
More importantly, each naval curriculum office, in discharging its responsibility to create a competent weapons or naval engineer, say, exerts a continuing, undue pressure that tends to maximize the number of courses that students take in order to make certain that nothing is overlooked that might contribute to a given specialty. The leavening influence and academic experience of the- faculty should have a much stronger if not the final voice in all matters relating to education. The naval curriculum system, as presently practiced, does not permit proper faculty participation in determining curricula content.
The academic intent of the Postgraduate School’s mission is to provide through graduate level education a basic framework of knowledge that is strong and viable enough for its graduates to use directly, or from which they can build with confidence, as they meet later technical situations. This function dictates that the school should not become involved in attempting to train individuals for specific repetitive engineering tasks. As an example of this, the nuclear engineering training program for preparing officers to serve on operational nuclear submarines is conducted completely independently of the Postgraduate School. On the other hand, study that leads to an understanding of the full potentialities of both operational and advanced nuclear power systems should be conducted at Monterey.
The requirement for providing a basic framework of knowledge is the main reason that a continuing effort be made to simplify the Postgraduate School’s course structure. As is gradually being realized throughout technical education circles everywhere, the continuing fragmentation of engineering and technology into various fields and sub-fields is diluting the underlying academic strength that has been responsible for thrusting technology and technical education into the fore in the past several decades. Recognizing the dangers of severe specialization, there is a resurgent interest today in progressive academic circles in a return to a hard-core technical education, an education that emphasizes the basic subject matter of the pure sciences, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, regardless of whether specific engineering disciplines are slighted. Lest it be feared that such an approach be too reactionary, it is well to note that these same pure sciences are themselves undergoing radical internal changes, changes that are preparing them to be even better vehicles for providing a framework that will enable the individual to cope with tomorrow’s technology.
The other two objections to current Postgraduate School practice, those of too many contact hours and short, ten-week terms have a common genesis that is a blend of two factors, the prewar “warming-up” role of the school and the long standing influence of the methods of instruction used for midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Unfortunately, the midshipman at Annapolis has an important advantage over his postgraduate school senior, for the midshipman owns and retains many of his textbooks, whereas the Postgraduate School student cannot retain his textbooks but must turn them in at the end of each ten- week term. The time-honored close relationship between a scholar and his books is clearly violated by this process.
These objections—compartmentalization of courses, many contact hours, and too short terms—are all symptomatic of old line military school instruction, a system characterized by a perfunctory and brief survey treatment of academic subjects, all paced to the fast staccato of a military drum. In past generations, there was much to be said in favor of this system for younger cadets, the young men of Sandhurst, Saint Cyr, West Point, and Annapolis who have gone forth to make history on the field of battle. This system of instruction, particularly as evolved at Annapolis where the fruits of centuries of life at sea have come to influence the educational process, produces finer stock from which leaders are made than any other system in the world. To do this, education in purely academic veins at these schools has had to be prostituted to some degree in order to provide the broad base upon which practical (fleet) experience can develop leadership. Thus, the true postgraduate school for the Naval Academy, in terms of the Academy’s primary mission of producing leaders, is the Fleet itself, not the U. S. Naval Postgraduate School.
The Postgraduate School exists to fill an additional, but nonetheless vital, need. This need is a searching after technical and philosophical fact that is best served by a few courses learned well and by a carefully fostered student-teacher relationship, first in the classroom, and then in the laboratory. This need the full military environment cannot provide because it is an academic need that must be met by education, not training. Such education must be conducted in a reasonable facsimile of the cloistered hall of the civilian university; therefore, within the Navy, the spirit of the conduct of affairs at the Postgraduate School must be more akin to that of its scientific brethren, the Naval Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, than to the Naval Academy. It is a demand of our times that today’s successful military leaders must become proficient in both fields, the physical field of men and combat and the technical field of sophisticated machines and thought processes.
The strengths of the Postgraduate School are many. Foremost among these is its inherently close liaison with the operational Navy, both through the officers assigned to its staff and through its students returning to the Fleet. The school is a much more sensitive and progressive servant of the element of society it serves—the Navy—than are most technical schools. As evidence of this, one need but examine the immense changes wrought in the school since World War II. Although the larger physical resources of government have been a factor, the school has responded to the Navy’s technological needs with fundamental changes in its structure in a much shorter time than its civilian counterparts.
Typical of this aggressive spirit, the school was one of the first in the country to establish a graduate course in operations analysis, now the responsibility of a full academic department. The school reorganization of 1962 joined this former Engineering School department with the former Management School. It is certain that in the next five to ten years the capability represented by this marriage, as it is currently being integrated with the extensive computer facilities at the school, will establish the Naval Postgraduate School as one of this country’s foremost centers of computer-oriented management study. In support of this role, special curricula in computer science are being implemented that will emphasize subjects such as PERT and PERT COST, new management cornerstones in the Department of Defense, and JOVIAL, the new universal programming language adopted by the Navy. Department of Defense policy envisions the Postgraduate School management capability as being the academic leader and coordinator of all governmental and service groups that promulgate and teach management techniques.
Exciting as the computer-management- operations analysis triumvirate may be, it should not be allowed to detract from continuing efforts to establish a deep flowing main stream of academic purpose for the Postgraduate School as a whole. With its internally generated reorganization in the summer of 1962 erasing the administrative distinctions between engineering, management, and professional naval subject functions, the school is in a unique position to build a respected capability as an institution whose academic strength lies in hard-core education in the liberal arts and sciences. In abandoning the diminishing rewards of trying to teach the diverging material associated with the present complex of engineering specialties and subspecialties and leaning more toward becoming a true college of arts and sciences, the Postgraduate School will play a pioneering role in American graduate technical education. Hard-core unspecialized education is the only educational weapon that can best the escalating technology of our time.
A properly conducted liberal arts and sciences course could embrace all of the technical expertise now sought in purely engineering courses while introducing the perspective of the humanities. A liberal arts and sciences emphasis to the line officer’s postgraduate education would be a logical academic extrapolation and would be in complete consonance with the traditional, and now vindicated, concept that a well-rounded background serves the naval officer best.
It is also being suggested that the Postgraduate School should change its name, “school” being too narrow a term for the broad program being executed and “postgraduate” not taking account of the undergraduate portion of that program. The Naval Institute of Technology has been suggested. Looking still further into the future, the “n” of naval leads many people into the title of National Institute of Technology, a true government university. Continuing high-level interest, such as the previously mentioned Department of Defense interest in the school’s unique management capability, could do much toward making this presently remote possibility a reality.
Fiscal year 1969 projections for the Postgraduate School show an expected enrollment of about 2,200 officers, almost a thousand more than the current level. Unfortunately, the Navy will probably experience considerable difficulty in reaching this figure with properly qualified candidates, for with the horizons of Navy postgraduate education broadened in recent years to include more esoteric subjects, such as international relations, political science, and personnel, with most of these conducted away from Monterey, the more difficult vigil of a technical education runs a poor second in popularity. Young officers who shy away from the harder road would do well to reconsider. An understanding of the technical roots of our society, when combined with the experience and opportunities of naval service and aggressive satisfaction of the normal urge for self-education through general reading, will make them equally competent and knowledgeable political, international, or social scientists. And their academic foundation for any other future eventuality will be much stronger.