The U.S. Naval Academy is foundering in a sea of bad ink. Last week Academy Superintendent Adm. Charles R. Larson ordered an unprecedented “stand-down,” canceling all leave to give his charges time to discuss proper conduct. But midshipmen complain that there is no shortage of talk about basic principles like honor and integrity at the venerable 151-year-old institution on the banks of the Severn River. The problem is translating those principles into practice. Some officers and students shrug off the latest round of headlines as pure bad luck; others fall back on gallows humor. “They shaved the Unabomber’s beard,” begins one lame joke, “and discovered he’s a midshipman.” Most colleges, military or civilian, have at least some problems with crime and rule-breaking. But after all the scandals involving Annapolis graduates, ranging from Oliver North to the flyboys of Tailhook, it’s fair to ask what lessons midshipmen– whose four-year educations cost taxpayers $200,000 per sailor–are really learning.
No one doubts the eagerness and idealism of the high-school valedictorians and football captains who come to Annapolis every July for Plebe Summer, the rigorous initiation into Academy life. But even the Navy brass acknowledges that too many Annapolis men and women are cynics by the time they get out into the Fleet four years later. Midshipmen “came in fired up, wanting to be challenged, and looked around, seeing others sloughing off, others who weren’t top-of-the-class types, and started finding their great dreams of integrity chipped away at,” wrote Richard Armitage, a Vietnam veteran and Academy grad who chaired a panel examining the school’s honor system in 1993.
Midshipmen are intentionally overworked. Forced to carry heavy academic loads, they also march, train and perform trivial chores, like memorizing obscure facts about the Academy. The idea is to build character through adversity, but often the result is a weary attitude of doing just enough to slide by. The honor system is supposed to ban lying and cheating, but to midshipmen, it puts a greater premium on loyalty than truth. “Never bilge [report] on a classmate,” is the informal code. “What then,” one professor asked, “is the difference between you and the mafia?” A midshipman answered, “We wear uniforms.”
The origins and cover-up of the 1992 cheating scandal dramatize some midshipmen’s twisted values. For $1,000, a student was able to buy a copy of the Electrical Engineering exam, which is notorious for its 40 percent failure rate. To make his money back, he offered to sell the exam for $50 a copy. But a football player he enlisted to help was too good a salesman, and the night before the exam there was a mob scene. More than 100 students saw the exam, or parts of it. Word leaked to the faculty, but most midshipmen successfully stonewalled. The honest ones who admitted their involvement were punished.
Midshipmen learn how to game the system, and resent those, like athletes and minorities, who are presumed to get special breaks. When the then Academy superintendent Adm. Thomas Lynch initially dismissed the cheating scandal as an isolated incident and reversed five of 11 expulsions ordered by the student-run honor committee, he was widely accused of protecting the football team. (Lynch had been co-captain of Navy’s 1963 squad.) The admiral backed down: of the 24 midshipmen who were finally kicked out, 10 were varsity athletes, including a sixth-round NFL draft pick.
Sexual harassment is a chronic problem at Annapolis. There was the case of Gwen Dreyer, the woman whose story went public after she was handcuffed to a urinal by some male dorm mates in 1989. Constituting about 13 percent of the Brigade, women are called WUBAs, after their uniform style (women’s uniform blue alpha); midshipmen crudely joke that WUBA stands for Women Used By All–not a culture that encourages victims to come forward. Some of the women allegedly harassed by the senior midshipman tried to report him, but were warned by student superiors that they could expect to be thrown out if they had broken the rule against having sex in the dorm. (The senior was finally sent to the brig for disobeying an order to stop threatening a former girlfriend.)
The Academy’s current superintendent, Admiral Larson, has encouraged abused women to speak out. He has heavily stressed ethics during his 20 months of command. Midshipmen are now required to read Plato and Aristotle and to visit the National Holocaust Memorial (a monument to “an application of misguided loyalty,” as one instructor describes it). Classes in leadership (once known as “leadersleep”) were reformed to stress integrity instead of management techniques. Quizzes that required midshipmen to answer ethical quandaries by multiple choice were replaced with case studies that have no simple answers.
But the reforms were not enough to end the Academy’s “culture of hypocrisy,” according to an article by an Annapolis instructor, James Barry, published in The Washington Post last month. Barry accused the administration of papering over the crisis. He noted that the Academy maintains a public-relations staff of 16 but only two full-time student counselors. Larson was furious about the piece, which he took personally. His voice catching with emotion, he told the faculty, “I feel betrayed.” Barry was yanked from his teaching duties but restored to the classroom after an outcry from midshipmen and instructors.
Other service academies have had their troubles–the occasional cheating or sex scandal–although not lately, nor with the frequency or drama of Annapolis. Reformers want fewer petty regulations, more time for reflection, more freedom to fail, more reward for showing initiative. The military is not about to allow its cherished academies to turn into liberal-arts colleges. Still, a little loosening up might help. Midshipmen (like West Point cadets) routinely nod off at their desks and sometimes pass out at attention. One way to fight the mids’ premature world-weariness, suggests one professor, would be simple: allow them more time to sleep.
