An article in the 14 July issue of The National Review, "Babylon Comes to Sparta" by John J. Miller, has raised considerable attention on the web. Because I am sometimes accused of having started all this trouble with the majors program introduced during my tour as Superintendent, I believe some comment is in order.
First, there was no doubt that the old lockstep curriculum where all midshipmen took an Electrical Engineering major had to be changed. The brigade was becoming more inclusive, to use today's word for it, and the competition for top-notch candidates was becoming ever more severe.
A great deal of work, including assistance from three college presidents on my Academic Advisory Board, went into the creation of the majors program. Admiral Thomas Moorer, then Chief of Naval Operations, was consulted many times in the process, and we had his complete approval.
Within a few years both the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy adopted similar programs.
The Navy is the most technical of the services, not only because of nuclear power, but also because of its heavy dependence on electronics and computers in its ships and planes. Nevertheless, it is necessary to have at least some officers who have concentrated on less technical matters. Thus there are majors in History, English, and Political Science while the other 16 are in engineering, math, or science fields.
The main thrust of the criticism, however, is about the ethics and leadership programs that somehow are seen as destroying the warrior spirit.
We have to recognize that these programs were initiated in the wake of the electrical-engineering scandals of the early 1990s. Admiral Charles Larson, when brought in for his second tour as Superintendent, was expected to, and did, institute programs designed to change the basic ethical standards of young people in their late teens and early 20s—not an easy task.
Plebe summer surveys, given with a strict requirement for anonymity, revealed a disturbingly lax attitude about cheating and lying—an attitude that stemmed from the high school culture they had just left behind. In these anonymous surveys more than three-quarters of the incoming plebes stated that they had cheated "frequently" in high school. Anonymous surveys at West Point showed similar results.
I was so disturbed by these facts that I spent some time quizzing contemporary high school students whose opinions I believed I could trust. Almost unanimously they agreed that it was true and that "the worst offenders were students who were getting all As." Perhaps they wanted those high grades to go to a competitive university such as Harvard or Stanford or Wellesley—or Annapolis or West Point.
In any case, it was clear that an effort had to be made to alter these views at a time of life when such changes do not come easily. A significant effort was made at the Naval Academy with the establishment of whole academic departments with these objectives.
There are, of course, flaws and shakedown problems in these programs, but the fact remains that the service academies (and, I believe, particularly West Point and Annapolis) are leading the way among four-year accredited universities in efforts to provide vigorous programs of these kinds in their curricula.
I have attended, along with several classmates and other senior Naval Academy alumni, several of these classes in ethics and leadership and have examined their text material. I believe that they are aimed in the right direction and that they will improve as the years go by. In addition, company officers are well aware of the new emphasis on character and the honor system and these officers are an important adjunct to the effort.
As for the warrior spirit, I do not believe we need look farther than the recent Iraq War for proof that our young graduates, both Navy and Marine Corps, have plenty of it. The performance of young Marine officers, the Navy Seals, and our naval aviators should make us all proud of our Academy.
Lastly, our civilian faculty, which has long been a proud tradition at Annapolis, is a vital part of the fine education we offer. If any institution of higher learning thinks that it can attract first-rate faculty members today with all of them possessing hard-boiled right-wing opinions, it is not facing reality. Today's faculty members were mostly in college during the 1960s and 1970s where they got a full dose of liberalism that most of them will only slowly, if ever, lose.
The balance that must be provided at a service academy is to have a carefully selected officer faculty (about half of the total faculty at Annapolis) and even more carefully selected company officers. It is the task of these officers, which I believe they take seriously, to make it clear that the purpose of the Navy and the Marine Corps is the defense of our nation and this often cannot be done with other than brute force and violence.
I believe we are most fortunate to have our midshipmen exposed to this balance between academia and military reality—and we should not get wobbly on it because of criticism by either radical right or left wingers.