Military Culture and Education

Current Intersections of Academic and Military Cultures

Douglas Higbee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317096122
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While studies of American military culture have proliferated in recent years, and the culture of academic institutions has been a subject of perennial interest, comparatively little has been written on the multiple ways the military and academe intersect. Focusing on this subject offers an opportunity to explore how teachers and researchers straddle the two quite different cultures. The contributors to this volume both embody and articulate how the two cultures co-exist and cooperate, however unevenly at times. Chapters offer both ground-level perspectives of the classroom and campus as well as well-considered articulations of the tensions and opportunities involved in teaching and training civic-minded soldiers on issues especially important in the post-9/11 world.

PART I
Intersections In and Out of the Field

Chapter 1
Real Officers Don’t Teach Keats: The Naval Academy, ROTC, and Military Spiritualism

Edward F. Palm

The ghost of James Webb haunts the halls of the English Department at the United States Naval Academy. This is quite an accomplishment, considering that Webb isn’t dead yet. A Naval Academy graduate of the class of ’68, a former Marine officer, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, a Georgetown Law School graduate, a best-selling and critically acclaimed novelist, a former Secretary of the Navy, and now a US senator—Webb always was an overachiever. But one of his unsung accomplishments was to position himself precisely at the intersection of the military and academic cultures at the Naval Academy, an institution uniquely illustrative of how those cultures come into conflict and where they find common ground.

Following the success of his first novel, Fields of Fire (1978), Webb wangled an appointment to his alma mater as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He taught there in the English Department from January 15 to June 15, 1979, breaking what was to have been an 18-month contract in order to pursue “other opportunities.”1 Anyone familiar with the pressures and problems of academic staffing would assume that there was, and perhaps still is, some bitterness over Webb’s early departure. It would also be understandable for those who had committed themselves heart and soul to the academic profession to resent having an apparent dilettante thrust upon them, especially one whose growing fame and fortune gave him the freedom to move on at will. But Webb’s ghostly presence in Sampson Hall, the longstanding home of the English Department, is not simply a matter of jealousy or resentment.

A House Divided

Ever since its inception in 1845, the Naval Academy has rested upon a myth: Academy founder George Bancroft so revered education that he hired a cadre of civilian professors to do it right. And, for the most part, thus it has remained. Only a handful of officers are permanently assigned to the Naval Academy. The great majority only pass through on two- or three-year tours of duty.2 The permanent faculty is predominantly civilian. In principle, this arrangement should make Navy the most progressive and enlightened of the academies—an enviable alliance between Athens and Sparta. In practice, it has resulted in a “house divided”—an uneasy and unequal marriage of convenience between two cultures, neither of which very much likes or trusts the other. Truth be told, the Naval Academy’s civilian faculty is not the hallmark of any great concern for education; rather, it is the mark of the Navy’s indifference.

Up until recently, the other academies have gone too far in the other direction, selecting virtually all their faculty from among their active duty ranks. This has long struck their critics as academically incestuous and, in the early nineties, began to impress Congress as wasteful of operationally trained officers in that era of defense cutbacks. Accordingly, West Point and the Air Force Academy both were ordered to look toward the Naval Academy model and to start incorporating civilian academics into their ranks. Navy’s supporters in Congress, however, still cannot or will not acknowledge the downside of civilianizing a service academy. Air Force and Army, by having officers fully involved in academics as well as leadership, send a clear signal to their cadets that both services do value education. (Both of these academies, moreover, have kept civilians in the minority, and neither one grants tenure to civilian faculty.) Navy, on the other hand, in relegating the business of education largely to civilians, leaves its midshipmen (a traditional title Navy insists on applying to women as well as men) wondering what the Navy really does value and expect from them.

The Naval Academy has always been quick to point out that a significant number of officers are assigned to the academic divisions. The current Web site boasts that the academy’s “600-member faculty is an integrated group of officers and civilians in nearly equal numbers” (United States Naval Academy 2009). In my experience, however, the roughly 300 officers counted toward that total includes company officers and others assigned to leadership or administrative billets. These officers do not teach in any formal sense and can hardly be considered “faculty.” Only in recent years have a handful of permanent military faculty members been appointed.3 But, again, the great majority of officers assigned to the Naval

Academy, in either instructional or leadership roles, merely pass through on their way back to the operating forces.

This is in marked contrast to the model adopted by the United States Military Academy at West Point. Its faculty still consists primarily of military officers, most of whom have earned master’s degrees at their service’s expense and who pass through on two- or three-year tours of duty. As directed by Congress, both Army and Air Force do now employ a limited number of civilian academics on fixed-term, and even some renewable, contracts, but the only permanent, or “tenured,” appointments at these academies are held by the military faculty. West Point also has an elite group of 28 military-academic elders, the term for which is “Professor, USMA.” These are generally full colonels who, by special federal statute, may remain on active duty at West Point until age 64½ and who retire as brigadier generals. One member of this group serves as the academic dean, and the rest chair the academic departments.4 While the Naval Academy, in recent years, has appointed 33 permanent military professors, academic leadership remains largely in the hands of a civilian dean and a civilian faculty.5

Palm: Professor or Major, USMC?

From its point of view, the Naval Academy selects officers to be military role models first and teachers second. An officer’s primary responsibility is to recruit for his or her warfare specialty and to the keep the “mids” focused on what is ultimately important—the prized commission that awaits them upon graduation. This means that, for the military faculty, teaching takes a back seat to meetings, social gatherings, and military training. (A fellow military faculty member once reminded me of the academy-correct attitude and set of priorities: “I’m a Marine first, a pilot second, and a professor third,” he declared.) On all occasions, in or out of the classroom, officers are expected to show themselves to be approachable, personable, and personally impressive. The goal is not just to be liked, but like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, to be “well-liked.” Among the more irreverent officers and mids, this is known as the “shiny shoes, empty head syndrome.”

A case in point is what it took to get me, as a Marine major, to Annapolis in the first place. Soon after reporting, I learned that the military hierarchy had been largely indifferent to my PhD, academic publications, and college teaching experience. They were seriously concerned about my atypical career pattern and the reputation I had established as an outspoken liberal loose cannon. (They were apparently indifferent to my enlisted service in Vietnam.) The civilian chair of my department, I later learned, had taken no position. Two colonels for whom I had worked, one a Naval Academy alumnus, had to vouch for my military professionalism before the academy would accept me.

Holding a PhD in English, I soon realized, was not a mark in my favor. Real Navy and Marine officers don’t teach Keats.6 All the services have certain prescribed career patterns designed to keep officers focused on their operational roles, but given its mission, the Navy tends to discourage idiosyncratic interests more than the other services. Graduate schooling followed by a pay-back teaching tour at the academy is not considered to be career-enhancing. This is especially the case if an officer commits him- or herself to a liberal arts field instead of engineering, math, or one of the hard sciences. But regardless of teaching field, an officer who wants to keep getting promoted in the Navy understands that he or she has to get back to the fleet. The “integration” the academy’s Web site touts, therefore, is more rhetorical than real. The civilian faculty predominate, and the Navy has allowed them to set up essentially a university departmental structure within a military command. The problem is that the values, ideals, and expectations on both sides are decidedly different.

Athens Versus Sparta

The most glaring difference involves the time-honored academic tradition of shared governance. Military organizations are hierarchical. There is a well-defined “chain of command,” and while this structure admits more collegial interaction and collaboration than the average civilian realizes, a military command is essentially an authoritarian organization. There is one individual in charge, the commander, who is clearly empowered to make all the decisions and is ultimately responsible for whatever the command does or fails to do. The commander, moreover, is not popularly elected but rather appointed by an officer above him or her in the chain of command.

The Naval Academy is unique among the service academies in that a largely self-governing civilian academic organization exists within a hierarchical, authoritarian military command. The academic divisions, which are comparable to colleges at civilian universities, are almost exclusively headed by senior military officers. But the department chairs are mostly civilian academics elected by their colleagues to fixed terms. In my experience, moreover, military division heads generally display the wisdom to leave the running of the academic program largely to the faculty.

This was certainly the case in the division in which I taught, the Division of English and History (which has since been subsumed into a larger organization, the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences). The division was, and as of this writing still is, headed by a Marine colonel, but my department chair was a civilian faculty member whom the faculty had elected to a four-year term. Likewise, tenure and promotion decisions are made very much the way they would be made at a university—through a process of peer review, with tenure and promotion committees elected from among the tenured faculty. While senior military faculty members are usually invited to serve on these committees, they are always in the minority. The academic peer groups at USNA are overwhelmingly civilian. As of this writing, for instance, the English Department has 25 civilian and eight military faculty members, only one of whom is a permanent military professor (United States Naval Academy 2009).

While earning tenure in USNA’s English Department is hardly a Darwinian publish-or-perish struggle, peer-reviewed scholarship is the expectation. Other departments have set the same standard and, along with English, have negotiated a three-credit release from the 12-credit teaching load specified as the contract requirement—the academy ostensibly being committed, first and foremost, to teaching. This release has been a constant source of tension between the faculty and the administration.

But if shared governance has always been important to the English faculty at the Naval Academy, the right to select and hire their colleagues is one the civilian faculty long ago appropriated and jealously guards. They form the hiring committees, they interview at the annual Modern Language Association convention, they invite a few leading candidates to campus, and they make the final hiring decisions—just as it is typically done in English departments at civilian colleges and universities throughout the nation.7

Enter James Webb’s Ghost

It is unclear just who secured Webb’s appointment to the Naval Academy in 1979, but it certainly was not initiated by the English Department faculty. And here is where the military and academic cultures do not just intersect; they collide.

From the military’s standpoint, Webb would seem to have been ideally qualified to teach at the academy. Not only was Webb an alumnus: he had gone on to become a Marine officer, a highly decorated combat veteran, a law-school graduate, and a best-selling and critically-acclaimed novelist. He was not an academic in the traditionalist sense, but the military hierarchy clearly considered him to be academic enough. The Naval Academy, after all, is just that—a service academy and not a university.

But Webb was hardly academic enough to suit the civilian faculty. Their criteria included a PhD, scholarly promise in a traditional or contemporary literary specialty, and a demonstrated commitment to the academic profession as a career. For the military hierarchy, however, what Webb lacked in traditional academic credentials, he more than made up for as a military role model. Webb’s assignment, in sum, challenged the assumptions of the civilian faculty, some of whom feared that the soldier-poet, and not the professional academic, would win out as the preferred model for a Naval Academy faculty member. The situation was aggravated only a few years later, when a Navy officer with a PhD was assigned to finish out his career teaching in the English Department. This officer applied for a civilian position in the department but was not even granted an interview. Upon his retirement, he wrote to the superintendent charging the English Department with being anti-military. As a consequence, the administration appointed a military officer to chair the department. The administration also intervened in one of the department’s searches, insisting that the department hire the candidate the administration preferred—a PhD who also happened to be a Naval Reserve officer. Only two or three years later, the department resumed their practice of electing chairs from among their civilian colleagues. In all fairness, however, the civilian chair is generally assisted by an associate chair that he or she selects from among the military faculty.8

“The Hall” Versus “the Yard”

Aside from threatening the civilian faculty’s hold on hiring, Webb’s short stint at USNA points up a longstanding, and still unresolved, debate about the nature and proper role of education in an institution committed to preparing young men and women for leadership in the Navy and Marine Corps. Academy officials are quick to tout education as “Job Number One,” the first priority at the Naval Academy. But as any member of the departments commonly referred to as the “bull departments”—English, History, and Political Science—will privately admit, the Navy hierarchy understands and values education only in the narrow scientific and technical sense. At his retirement ceremony in Annapolis, an outgoing Chief of Naval Operations laid it on the line when he urged the Brigade of Midshipmen to major in math or science lest they find themselves “wallflowers in the ballroom of progress” (Anderson 2008).

The entire academy program, moreover, is designed to keep midshipmen overburdened in pursuit of what one superintendent, in my hearing, termed “balanced excellence.” The mids routinely carry upwards of 20 credit hours every semester and must participate in a number of military and extracurricular activities. Sleep deprivation and constant stress are both intended results. When I was there, new faculty members were urged not to take it personally and to be lenient when mids fall asleep in class. The point of it all, as I heard another superintendent say, was to force the mids “to compartmentalize their lives the way an officer in combat must compartmentalize his.” The emphasis has long been on mission accomplishment and, only in recent years (and largely as the result of a few well-publicized scandals), has the Naval Academy begun to pay serious attention to the societal and ethical implications of the mission.

What the academy has never understood, or intentionally ignores, is that liberal education is antithetical to compartmentalization. It depends upon having “world enough and time” to draw parallels and make connections between disciplines.9 The Naval Academy, it has always seemed to me, encourages midshipmen to view education, whether technical or liberal, as only the means to a pragmatic end.

While today’s mids are free to major in a full range of traditional academic majors, including the “bull subjects” of English, history, and political science, they must also take a core engineering curriculum that includes calculus, physics, and electrical engineering—hence, the requirement to carry upwards of 20 credit hours every semester.

This insistence on making every graduate an engineer is an article of faith shared by all the federal service academies and reflects a presumption born of military hubris. It is telling that the services use the term “doctrine” to denote the prescribed operating procedures and the steps to take in the face of various anticipated tactical contingencies. Military manuals and handbooks tend to present war as a kind of calculus problem, one a well-prepared officer can solve through a correct application of the appropriate “doctrine.” The military has always been loathe to admit the role of chance and circumstance in a battle’s outcome. Military training and education programs, ironically, tend to give short shrift to military history, which is replete with accounts of the best laid plans gone awry and victory snatched from the jaws of defeat through spontaneous feats of daring and improvisation the enemy never anticipated.

Military history notwithstanding, true believers still cling to this article of faith: “Everyone knows they have to be engineers.” An elderly woman, the wife of a retired Naval Academy alumnus, told me this upon learning that I was teaching English at the academy. She went on to date the ruination of the academy from the introduction of liberal arts majors. The Navy, of course, can make a stronger case than the other services. It needs nuclear engineers to run its submarines and its nuclear-powered surface ships as well as its complex weapons systems. But the great majority of Naval officers, including academy graduates, serve in other capacities. “Poly Sci and fly!” many a midshipman hoping to secure the requisite GPA for flight school has been heard to say.

Still, there is a method to the madness at Annapolis. Regardless of academic major or ultimate ambition, all the mids are hoisted on the academy’s hallowed version of Neptune’s trident. The academic program constitutes only one prong of that trident. The other two are athletics and military performance (which includes leadership).10 This pursuit of “balanced excellence” is not for “pencil-necked geeks,” as I heard a superintendent remind a faculty assembly. In all fairness to those out of sympathy with “geeks” or nerds, the most effective officers, and the ones destined for high command, do tend to have excellent people skills and can stand up to a great deal of pressure. Toward this end, the en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Intersections
• PART I INTERSECTIONS IN AND OUT OF THE FIELD
• PART II MILITARY ACADEMIES AND HUMANISTIC INQUIRY
• PART III TEACHING IN PROFESSIONAL MILITARY SCHOOLS
• Bibliography
• Index