By Bruce Fleming
Monday, October 16, 2017
The military world and military academies—I’m a tenured
civilian professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis—were
rocked by an October 11 “open letter” exposing the rotten underbelly of our
sister academy at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy.
The letter was penned by Robert Heffington, an Army
officer and West Point graduate who taught there for several years before
retiring. Only his retirement made it possible for him to publish the letter,
since officers in uniform cannot publicly disagree with superiors. Within 24
hours, West Point Superintendent Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslan Jr., head of the
administration Heffington holds responsible for its deficiencies, responded by
evoking the “thousands of graduates who sacrifice and serve honorably every
day.”
Heffington’s letter is a scorcher. It pulls no punches
and concludes it’s questionable whether West Point, founded in 1802, “should
ever remain open.” Heffington’s “BLUF,” Bottom Line Up Front: “First and
foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but
nowhere else. The senior administration at West Point inexplicably refuses to
enforce West Point’s publicly touted high standards on cadets, and, having
picked up on this, cadets refuse to enforce standards on each other.” He goes on:
“The Superintendent refuses to enforce admissions standards or the cadet Honor
Code, the Dean refuses to enforce academic standards, and the Commandant
refuses to enforce standards of conduct and discipline.”
Heffington notes that students are admitted to play
Division I football, which degrades academics: “we routinely admit athletes
with ACT scores in the mid-teens across the board. I have personally taught
cadets who are borderline illiterate and cannot read simple passages from the
assigned textbooks.” Faculty members who object are silenced, he says.
To this, I say “Amen, brother.” Heffington’s letter
caused me personal joy and professional agony. I’ve been making a number of the
same points about Annapolis, an essentially identical taxpayer-funded
institution, for the last several decades, earning repeated salvos of our
administration’s ire and attempts to silence me. (West Point has few civilian
professors, and no tenured ones.) So it was gratifying to hear someone else say
the same things about our sister institution, with more vitriol than I usually
employ.
So much needs to change with our institutions, yet there
no signs of any changes even being contemplated. This is bad news for the
taxpayers who are footing the bill and depend on them for one-fifth of the new
officer pool. It’s also bad news for the disaffected, cynical students who have
lost faith in the system. I think Heffington saw the cynicism without
understanding its source. I think I do.
The Reasons to
Prefer a Military Academy Are Few
Most upper-class students at service academies have lost
faith in the system, because it’s based on lies. First, these places produce
about one new officer in five nowadays, far fewer than their glory days. Most
other officers come from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, Officer
Candidate School, or direct commissions. West Point (USMA) produces about half
the number of officers of Army ROTC. Service academy graduates cost taxpayers
about half a million dollars each plus wrap-around health care and so on, four
times what the average ROTC officer costs and eight times what OCS costs.
That’s right: you can go to a civilian school ROTC for
four years, put on a uniform a day or two a week, party as you like, have sex
when you want (sex is forbidden at the academies), major in what you want,
graduate, and serve alongside academy graduates—and no data show you’ll be a
worse officer. The students know this because they all have iPhones and Google.
The defenders of the academies fall back on that tired cliché
of calling them “national treasures.” Up to World War II, they probably were,
because that’s where almost all officers came from. We need officers, so if
that’s their source, the source is a “treasure.” Only it turned out that
officers can come from other sources! So it’s simply not true that all the
pointless and infuriating things you have to do at the academies are necessary
for being an officer, because 80 percent of officers don’t do these things and
are just as good.
Defenders of the academies, invariably themselves
graduates who got a college education at taxpayer expense, say they “set the
tone” for the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard. There’s no evidence of
this, and in any case I hope it’s not true, because their tone is one of deep disillusionment.
Hate to Break It,
But We’re Not the ‘Best and Brightest’
Another of the big lies, as Heffington shows, is the
assertion that military academy students are the “best and the brightest.” I
can’t tell whether the military brass really have no clue, or this is just hype
to keep the tax dollars flowing and make the students feel it’s worth it. In
fact, our SAT scores are about 100 points per test lower than Ivy-level
schools, and the spread between upper and lower levels much greater. About 20 percent
of our class consists of students recruited for athletics or given preferential
admission to achieve racial goals (meaning non-white), and cannot get in even
at the low level of SAT scores of 600 on each test with As and Bs in high
school.
Not a problem; we send them at taxpayer expense to the
relevant prep school, where nine months of a 13th grade are supposed to
remediate what may be intrinsic mental slowness or decades of poor education.
Typically it doesn’t, and these students fill our pre-college classes in
English and math and fail to graduate at higher percentages. The truly gifted
students (we have some) realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. We have no
magic chemical test for good “leaders” to make up for academic deficiencies. We
don’t even require an interview for admission. Come to my classes to see how
little “wow” factor many have.
Another lie is the wild exaggeration of our selectivity.
I’ve been on our Admissions Board, so I have expertise Heffington doesn’t. We
claim to get about 20,000 applicants, but define “applicant” as no other
college does, by including the 7,500 high school juniors who want to come to
our six-day summer seminar (only 2,500 come) and recently, all Navy ROTC
applicants to any institution, as well as stubs of applications where a kid was
convinced to enter his or her name and address and little more.
When I was on the Admissions Board, we considered about
4,500 applications for about 1,800 admits. That’s not the 7 to 8 percent “most
selective” statistics the brass continue to report to U.S. News and World Report and the U.S. Department of Education.
The students see the disappointing quality of those around them and begin to
figure out that somehow these cannot be the “best and the brightest.”
Many Of Our Key Promises
Are Broken
Because we admit to serve racial goals and to fill our
teams, and because higher graduation rates make us look better, we aren’t about
to throw anybody out. So what Heffington says is true: we “remediate” honor
offenses nowadays, inability to pass the Physical Readiness Training, and just
about everything else. Faculty members have also given up thinking that
reporting plagiarism will result in any meaningful action.
Another set of lies is in the way that a policy of “no
sex” has survived from the days when it made sense, back when we were all male
with no out gays. Now we have one-third women, gay students, and, briefly,
transsexual students. They all live in the same dormitory and are full of
hormones. Of course they’re going to be having sex. They know what other
college students do, and they know they’re not on ships (which also have
problems with sex), so the lies the administration tells them about how this is
like being deployed don’t impress them.
Finally, the officers they are supposed to emulate are
fairly clueless and, according to the students, generally not very good role
models. They aren’t here long enough to figure out what’s what, and because
they are in the students’ chain of command, the students don’t talk freely with
them. By contrast, I have had countless hall and office no-holds-barred
conversations with midshipmen over three decades.
What the officers say to students frequently makes no
sense: the training staff pitches the same full-bore fit at small infractions
as at large. Plebes are told they have “just killed a platoon of Marines” if
their uniform is out of reg. They know it isn’t true, so they tune out the
adults shouting at them.
We’re All Going
Through the Motions
The only reason for the military to get hundreds of
millions of taxpayer dollars to run stand-alone colleges with standard classes
is that these classes are somehow different. People on the outside think we’re
Hogwarts. We aren’t. We teach the same subjects as down the street at the
University of Maryland. Worse, the cadets and midshipmen are sleep-deprived and
unwilling students, except for the few dozen top achievers who are candidates
for coveted national scholarships. As Heffington notes, they can re-take an F
for a higher grade in the summer—at taxpayer expense. Still, with grade
inflation, that rarely happens.
The vast majority are going through the motions, sleeping
in class, memorizing, then mind-dumping largely technical material they forget
anyway and whose utility has never been shown. (Electrical engineering for
pilots, SEALs, or Marine Corps? Nonsense.) How do I know? They tell me. They
won’t tell an 0-5, or anybody wearing a uniform, who can punish them for it.
I have to go to great lengths to get them involved in
English, a subject most freshmen (plebes) have no interest in. Two semesters
are required, which is good thing because typically their writing is terrible
and they cannot organize their ideas coherently. But because the classes are
mandatory and they came to be in the military, most are resistant. I have to
win them over. We do things they like, such as push-ups and jumping up and down
every 20 minutes to keep them awake. This is what it takes. Remember: I’ve been
here more than three decades.
Do we teach them leadership? Well, we have courses called
that, but at best these are intro psychology classes, and the high numbers of
U.S. national academy graduates relieved of command in recent years or caught
up in the Fat Leonard scandal suggests that our brand of “leadership” isn’t
effective. Leadership, whatever that is, isn’t learned in a classroom.
The service academies are now the vanity projects of the
military brass, not viable contributions to US. defense. They’re like all those
military jets the current cabinet members love to use: flashy, expensive, and
lots of fun. The superintendent lives in a Victorian mansion complete with
waitstaff and has a reserved parking spot when he has to go two buildings over.
The institution is the staging ground for their retirement ceremonies and
funerals, and countless empty colloquia all based around the “leadership” we
purport to teach but don’t.
It’s Basically a
Military Disneyland
What does make us different from another college is the
wrap-around control of students’ lives that leaves them unmotivated and mad,
Mickey Mouse regulations that change from regime to regime, are applied
randomly, and have no proven officer development benefits. The students realize
they are cast members in a military Disneyland run for the benefit of the brass
and the tourists, not the taxpayers who pay their way and want better-than-average
officers. This is why they dress sloppily, answer back, and seem to take no
pride in what they do—all the things Heffington saw as a direct affront to his
officership.
For me, one of the most unsettling developments of the
military in recent decades has been its courting by politicians to further
their own personal agendas. A horrifying example was the disgusting
commencement speech by Vice President Mike Pence at our last graduation
repeatedly telling the military that it was better than the civilians it
defends, and his attempt to position President Trump as “the best friend the
military ever had.” Who doesn’t support our military? This is creating enemies
that don’t exist.
The military is supposed to be apolitical. It’s a tool,
not part of a specific political party. We need to do what the British did with
Sandhurst: turn undergraduate education over to the ROTC programs and colleges,
and use our beautiful buildings (and West Point’s incomparable location on the
Hudson) for military graduate courses.
Our service academies are anachronisms trying to pretend
they aren’t. The students have caught on. The administration hasn’t, and never
will, because then they’d lose their taxpayer-sponsored country clubs. Defense?
Nah. It’s all about show. The students, and the taxpayers, pay the price.
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