Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times Magazine
September 21, 2008
Pg. MM40
By James Traub
On the opening day of classes last month at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., midshipmen in khakis or “working blues” strode among the ancient trees of the campus yard under a flawless sky, the Severn River sparkling in the background. The middies carried backpacks, just like the kids at Johns Hopkins or Georgetown (though they all seemed to tote the exact same black backpack). They were going to chem or English lit, just like those kids. I was looking out at this achingly lovely tableau from the front of the splendid Beaux-Arts chapel, whose great copper dome dominates the campus. My tour guide showed me the mighty bronze doors. Here was Mother Patriotism, and here, Father Knowledge. A young man was portrayed kneeling before the graybeard, offering up the fruit of his learning. It was . . . a torpedo.
Annapolis is a strikingly hybrid place — a venerable Northeastern college that functions as “a revved-up leadership training center,” as one professor put it to me. While its fellow elite universities take their cues from tenured faculty, Annapolis is directed, with no apologies, by the Navy brass and shaped by the perceived needs of the Navy. Yet it does compete for students and for faculty with the elite institutions of the civilian world. It has to adapt both to its marketplace and to the larger political and cultural environment in which the military operates. And so while today’s Annapolis is very much itself, and not very much like Johns Hopkins or Georgetown, it is also a very different place from the starker, simpler and stranger Annapolis of 50 years ago, which so deeply marked John McCain and which features so prominently in his biography.
McCain, of course, had saltwater in his veins. His father, John Sr., graduated with the class of 1931, and his grandfather, also John, the class of ’06. Both were admirals. McCain was a hell-raiser at the academy, but it’s central to the story he tells of himself that he ultimately accepted the call to duty and obedience, the ancient principles and the shining absolutes; in a commencement speech he delivered at the academy in 1993, McCain cited his father’s commencement address almost a quarter-century earlier, in which the older man invoked the “sense of loyalty and dedication which scorns vacillation and doubt.” That was Annapolis for three generations of McCains.
The Naval Academy that John McCain entered in 1954 featured the same “lock-step curriculum” that his father and grandfather studied. All students took the exact same courses, with a heavy emphasis on engineering. There were no majors. The department of English, history and government, which included the whole of the humanities and the social sciences, was known by the nickname Bull. The classroom, in any case, scarcely constituted the core of the midshipman experience. McCain hardly mentions classes in his memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.” In a novel of the academy, “A Sense of Honor,” James Webb, class of ’68 and now a senator from Virginia, begins one of his few descriptions of classroom life as follows: “The instructor, a balding man in a frumpy brown suit, was telling them how to determine the water pressure on the side of a ship’s hull at various depths.” The one character who actually loves learning and thinking, a hapless plebe named John Dean, is widely treated as a pitiful specimen.
The real action at the Naval Academy involved the endurance and infliction of suffering. Upperclassmen were permitted, indeed encouraged, to subject plebes to a campaign of bullying, brutality and psychological terror. The implicit idea was to expose new students to the kinds of intense stress they might experience in wartime; but the actual experience sounds more like “Lord of the Flies.” In a Washingtonian magazine article in 1979, Webb, a cussed soul like McCain, described an incident in which upperclassmen ordered him to stick his arms out straight, then began piling rifles on them and took them off one by one. Then, when he drooped, they replaced the rifles with books. Then a pencil. Then a toothpick. They forced him to answer picayune questions, shouting all the while that he was a hopeless loser. The next night he was pummeled with a cricket bat until the bat broke. And Webb, to his everlasting pride, never cracked — though when finally dismissed, he raced to his room and wept.
This self-enclosed and anti-intellectual warrior culture could not survive the liberating atmosphere of the ’60s. The need to appeal to a new kind of student forced Navy officials to open up the curriculum so that midshipmen could major in a range of academic subjects — though always with a base in math and engineering. Women were admitted in 1976. And since women were not to be touched, the more abusive forms of hazing began to disappear, and with them much of the plebe system itself. Many old salts took it hard. In the Washingtonian article, Webb conceded that the practices were “harsh and cruel.” The most extreme of them were unacceptable. But, he wrote sadly, “I don’t see anything at the Naval Academy anymore that can take a person deep inside himself. I see refinement. I see an overemphasis on academics at the expense of leadership.” And women? They were “poisoning” the academy’s antique culture.
Today’s Naval Academy, having endured sex scandals and cheating scandals, is very sensitive about its public image. When I contacted a public-affairs official to say that I was writing an article comparing the academy of McCain’s day with today’s, she wrote back saying that “as a federal government and military installation, we will not be able to assist you with your story since we cannot be involved with political campaigns or in any way imply any endorsement of a political candidate.” I would not be permitted to speak to faculty, students or administrators. I would be given the standard public tour (though it would be off the record). Fortunately for me, any number of faculty members viewed this directive as preposterous — if revealing of the academy’s insular culture — and agreed to speak with me, as did several recent graduates (though almost all insisted on anonymity to avert the ire of Superintendent Jeffrey Fowler, a three-star admiral).
So far as I could tell, the Naval Academy has no dark secrets to hide. Much that is distinctive about it has remained intact. The entire Brigade, as the 4,400 students are collectively known, lives in Bancroft Hall and eats meals together at the same prescribed time. Sex is not allowed, drinking is not allowed; plebes are not allowed to be in or on their beds during waking hours on weekdays. Midshipmen pour in from every corner of the campus for noon formation, where they line up by company in front of and behind Bancroft and then march into lunch to the strains of “Anchors Aweigh” and “The Marines’ Hymn.” The day of my visit, tourists gathered five- or six-deep to witness this spectacle. “There’s a good use of your tax dollars,” my guide proudly said.
While the academy still has a flair for stirring pageantry, it seems less certain than it used to be about what makes a good Naval officer. Top Navy officials have directed that the percentage of students majoring in Division III, which covers the nonsciences, be reduced in the next five years from 40 percent to 35 percent. Almost everyone I spoke with reached for tug-of-war metaphors when evoking the Annapolis experience. It was Athens versus Sparta. Or it was “Bancroft versus Sampson,” as one academic put it; Sampson is the building that houses classrooms and offices for the humanities and stands directly across the yard from the mighty womb of the Brigade.
Or it was the outside world against the interior culture: one recent graduate, who had slogged his way through years of mandatory math and science before being allowed to study political science, wrote that “current events and a good dose of pressure from the civilian and military professors in the Division III departments have forced the administration (and alumni network, which is also very committed to maintaining the academy’s reputation as an engineering school intact) to reconsider its treatment of Division III.”
The faculty exerts a force of its own. None of the academics I met were balding men in frumpy brown suits. They had been educated in, and in many cases taught at, the nation’s leading universities. The active-duty officers among them had some of the most impressive academic pedigrees. Academy officials say that half of the faculty is civilian, and they predominate in many of the standard academic fields. At West Point, by contrast, the faculty is overwhelmingly military, and departments are headed by military officers. Civilian professors at Navy have tenure, unlike those at Army. All of the academics I spoke to said that they were free to teach as they wish and to assign whichever books they deem pertinent. And they teach pretty much what professors teach elsewhere — though the Navy permits academic innovations only after long usage elsewhere has removed any taint of novelty. The department of language studies now includes Arabic and Chinese. There’s a class on the 2008 election. The Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies represents a hesitant move toward regional studies.
Annapolis has thus become, in Jim Webb’s damning phrase, refined (though Webb has since repented his diatribe). The old plebe system appears to have vanished into history: hazing is now a punishable offense. Midshipmen used to march to class and to chapel; underclassmen were generally forbidden to ride in a car, much less own or drive one; they couldn’t drink on campus or off. All these rules have been relaxed (though Admiral Fowler, noting that “we are at war,” has ordered a tightening of the screws). Bancroft is even air-conditioned.
But those faculty members who would like the academy to be a more supple and self-conscious institution aren’t at all sure how far they have succeeded. “It’s a functional mentality,” as one scholar put it. Students are being prepared to pilot what the academy refers to as “platforms” — ships, planes, etc. Successful learning means mastering the platform. Annapolis thus has an engineering mentality even when it isn’t teaching engineering. All students, even the 6 percent or so who major in English literature, graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree. And though academics, in general, matter far more than they did in McCain’s day, Athens can push Sparta just so far. As one former student observed, “Midshipmen wake up every day knowing exactly what is expected of them, and they want to know exactly what is expected of them in the classroom — an attitude which naturally infringes on the sort of where-curiosity-leads educational style that might enable more intellectual stimulation.”
For all that it has changed over the last half-century, the Naval Academy seems to be lagging behind the changes in war itself. The United States has not fought a conventional war since it ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. Leading military figures like Gen. David Petraeus, the driving force behind the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, argue that today’s wars must be fought not only as military enterprises but also as political and cultural ones. The Navy itself now has an Irregular Warfare Office. But the academy continues to view linguistic or cultural fluency as an add-on or a distraction. Williamson Murray, a distinguished military historian who taught last year at Annapolis, said that the Naval Academy overemphasized technical subjects. The students who stick to engineering, he said, may “make great officers in nuclear submarines,” but “the danger is when they become admiral they will not have the intellectual preparation to handle the world we’re in.” What’s more, the one-fifth or so of graduates who elect to join the Marines have very little use for all those mandatory science classes. Future marines, Murray observed, tend to major in Division III, thus “siphoning off many of those who are going to understand the international environment of the 21st century.”
At the same time, students attracted to history or political science say that they have no trouble satisfying their craving for intellectual challenge and reflection. Murray said that, while he was appalled by the ignorance of the incoming freshmen, he found that the students in one of his senior seminars were “by far and away” superior to those he had taught at Yale and elsewhere in their “level of sophistication, writing ability, understanding of history, capacity to connect the dots between different periods.” These students are just as inclined as good students everywhere to question established wisdom. One professor told me he had polled a group of upperclassmen on the presidential race this past May. He was shocked to read the final tally: Hillary Clinton, 0; the war hero and Navy legend John McCain, 7; Barack Obama, 13. Virtually all of them, he said, took a dim view of the chief architects of the Iraq war (though they continued to respect the commander in chief).
There must have been such students in John McCain’s day; McCain himself might have been one of them. But they were not encouraged to think critically. McCain was forged by a culture of certitudes and offers himself today as a man of steadfast principle, stubborn conviction and a cocky, fighting spirit. Those were the unexamined virtues of his Naval Academy and of his father’s and grandfather’s Naval Academy. But now they are examined; and perhaps today’s elite students feel more comfortable with Barack Obama’s self-questioning than with McCain’s pugnacity and brio. These students live in a world where even vacillation and doubt can at times count as martial virtues.
One veteran professor told me about a case study from the war in Afghanistan that he uses in class. American troops spotted three trucks winding through a mountain pass. When the first two emerged, they were carrying Taliban troops, whom they promptly killed or captured. The third truck was still back in the mountains. A helicopter buzzed up and located it, but it wasn’t clear if this last truck held more Taliban or civilians. The chopper drew within firing range; a figure abruptly stood up in the truck’s bed.
You’re the commanding officer, the professor said: What do you do? Shoot, said almost all the students. Hold your fire, said the few who had seen combat. A mistake, they explained, would not only kill civilians but also jeopardize the larger war effort.
In reality, the commanding officer ordered his men not to shoot; and the truck turned out to be full of women and children. Lesson learned. “When I first came here,” the professor said, “the case studies asked if the right answer was a, b or c. You can only think that way when no one is actually going off to war.” Or perhaps, when no one is going off to the kind of war America now finds itself fighting.
James Traub, a contributing writer, is the author of “The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did).”
September 21, 2008
Pg. MM40
By James Traub
On the opening day of classes last month at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., midshipmen in khakis or “working blues” strode among the ancient trees of the campus yard under a flawless sky, the Severn River sparkling in the background. The middies carried backpacks, just like the kids at Johns Hopkins or Georgetown (though they all seemed to tote the exact same black backpack). They were going to chem or English lit, just like those kids. I was looking out at this achingly lovely tableau from the front of the splendid Beaux-Arts chapel, whose great copper dome dominates the campus. My tour guide showed me the mighty bronze doors. Here was Mother Patriotism, and here, Father Knowledge. A young man was portrayed kneeling before the graybeard, offering up the fruit of his learning. It was . . . a torpedo.
Annapolis is a strikingly hybrid place — a venerable Northeastern college that functions as “a revved-up leadership training center,” as one professor put it to me. While its fellow elite universities take their cues from tenured faculty, Annapolis is directed, with no apologies, by the Navy brass and shaped by the perceived needs of the Navy. Yet it does compete for students and for faculty with the elite institutions of the civilian world. It has to adapt both to its marketplace and to the larger political and cultural environment in which the military operates. And so while today’s Annapolis is very much itself, and not very much like Johns Hopkins or Georgetown, it is also a very different place from the starker, simpler and stranger Annapolis of 50 years ago, which so deeply marked John McCain and which features so prominently in his biography.
McCain, of course, had saltwater in his veins. His father, John Sr., graduated with the class of 1931, and his grandfather, also John, the class of ’06. Both were admirals. McCain was a hell-raiser at the academy, but it’s central to the story he tells of himself that he ultimately accepted the call to duty and obedience, the ancient principles and the shining absolutes; in a commencement speech he delivered at the academy in 1993, McCain cited his father’s commencement address almost a quarter-century earlier, in which the older man invoked the “sense of loyalty and dedication which scorns vacillation and doubt.” That was Annapolis for three generations of McCains.
The Naval Academy that John McCain entered in 1954 featured the same “lock-step curriculum” that his father and grandfather studied. All students took the exact same courses, with a heavy emphasis on engineering. There were no majors. The department of English, history and government, which included the whole of the humanities and the social sciences, was known by the nickname Bull. The classroom, in any case, scarcely constituted the core of the midshipman experience. McCain hardly mentions classes in his memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.” In a novel of the academy, “A Sense of Honor,” James Webb, class of ’68 and now a senator from Virginia, begins one of his few descriptions of classroom life as follows: “The instructor, a balding man in a frumpy brown suit, was telling them how to determine the water pressure on the side of a ship’s hull at various depths.” The one character who actually loves learning and thinking, a hapless plebe named John Dean, is widely treated as a pitiful specimen.
The real action at the Naval Academy involved the endurance and infliction of suffering. Upperclassmen were permitted, indeed encouraged, to subject plebes to a campaign of bullying, brutality and psychological terror. The implicit idea was to expose new students to the kinds of intense stress they might experience in wartime; but the actual experience sounds more like “Lord of the Flies.” In a Washingtonian magazine article in 1979, Webb, a cussed soul like McCain, described an incident in which upperclassmen ordered him to stick his arms out straight, then began piling rifles on them and took them off one by one. Then, when he drooped, they replaced the rifles with books. Then a pencil. Then a toothpick. They forced him to answer picayune questions, shouting all the while that he was a hopeless loser. The next night he was pummeled with a cricket bat until the bat broke. And Webb, to his everlasting pride, never cracked — though when finally dismissed, he raced to his room and wept.
This self-enclosed and anti-intellectual warrior culture could not survive the liberating atmosphere of the ’60s. The need to appeal to a new kind of student forced Navy officials to open up the curriculum so that midshipmen could major in a range of academic subjects — though always with a base in math and engineering. Women were admitted in 1976. And since women were not to be touched, the more abusive forms of hazing began to disappear, and with them much of the plebe system itself. Many old salts took it hard. In the Washingtonian article, Webb conceded that the practices were “harsh and cruel.” The most extreme of them were unacceptable. But, he wrote sadly, “I don’t see anything at the Naval Academy anymore that can take a person deep inside himself. I see refinement. I see an overemphasis on academics at the expense of leadership.” And women? They were “poisoning” the academy’s antique culture.
Today’s Naval Academy, having endured sex scandals and cheating scandals, is very sensitive about its public image. When I contacted a public-affairs official to say that I was writing an article comparing the academy of McCain’s day with today’s, she wrote back saying that “as a federal government and military installation, we will not be able to assist you with your story since we cannot be involved with political campaigns or in any way imply any endorsement of a political candidate.” I would not be permitted to speak to faculty, students or administrators. I would be given the standard public tour (though it would be off the record). Fortunately for me, any number of faculty members viewed this directive as preposterous — if revealing of the academy’s insular culture — and agreed to speak with me, as did several recent graduates (though almost all insisted on anonymity to avert the ire of Superintendent Jeffrey Fowler, a three-star admiral).
So far as I could tell, the Naval Academy has no dark secrets to hide. Much that is distinctive about it has remained intact. The entire Brigade, as the 4,400 students are collectively known, lives in Bancroft Hall and eats meals together at the same prescribed time. Sex is not allowed, drinking is not allowed; plebes are not allowed to be in or on their beds during waking hours on weekdays. Midshipmen pour in from every corner of the campus for noon formation, where they line up by company in front of and behind Bancroft and then march into lunch to the strains of “Anchors Aweigh” and “The Marines’ Hymn.” The day of my visit, tourists gathered five- or six-deep to witness this spectacle. “There’s a good use of your tax dollars,” my guide proudly said.
While the academy still has a flair for stirring pageantry, it seems less certain than it used to be about what makes a good Naval officer. Top Navy officials have directed that the percentage of students majoring in Division III, which covers the nonsciences, be reduced in the next five years from 40 percent to 35 percent. Almost everyone I spoke with reached for tug-of-war metaphors when evoking the Annapolis experience. It was Athens versus Sparta. Or it was “Bancroft versus Sampson,” as one academic put it; Sampson is the building that houses classrooms and offices for the humanities and stands directly across the yard from the mighty womb of the Brigade.
Or it was the outside world against the interior culture: one recent graduate, who had slogged his way through years of mandatory math and science before being allowed to study political science, wrote that “current events and a good dose of pressure from the civilian and military professors in the Division III departments have forced the administration (and alumni network, which is also very committed to maintaining the academy’s reputation as an engineering school intact) to reconsider its treatment of Division III.”
The faculty exerts a force of its own. None of the academics I met were balding men in frumpy brown suits. They had been educated in, and in many cases taught at, the nation’s leading universities. The active-duty officers among them had some of the most impressive academic pedigrees. Academy officials say that half of the faculty is civilian, and they predominate in many of the standard academic fields. At West Point, by contrast, the faculty is overwhelmingly military, and departments are headed by military officers. Civilian professors at Navy have tenure, unlike those at Army. All of the academics I spoke to said that they were free to teach as they wish and to assign whichever books they deem pertinent. And they teach pretty much what professors teach elsewhere — though the Navy permits academic innovations only after long usage elsewhere has removed any taint of novelty. The department of language studies now includes Arabic and Chinese. There’s a class on the 2008 election. The Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies represents a hesitant move toward regional studies.
Annapolis has thus become, in Jim Webb’s damning phrase, refined (though Webb has since repented his diatribe). The old plebe system appears to have vanished into history: hazing is now a punishable offense. Midshipmen used to march to class and to chapel; underclassmen were generally forbidden to ride in a car, much less own or drive one; they couldn’t drink on campus or off. All these rules have been relaxed (though Admiral Fowler, noting that “we are at war,” has ordered a tightening of the screws). Bancroft is even air-conditioned.
But those faculty members who would like the academy to be a more supple and self-conscious institution aren’t at all sure how far they have succeeded. “It’s a functional mentality,” as one scholar put it. Students are being prepared to pilot what the academy refers to as “platforms” — ships, planes, etc. Successful learning means mastering the platform. Annapolis thus has an engineering mentality even when it isn’t teaching engineering. All students, even the 6 percent or so who major in English literature, graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree. And though academics, in general, matter far more than they did in McCain’s day, Athens can push Sparta just so far. As one former student observed, “Midshipmen wake up every day knowing exactly what is expected of them, and they want to know exactly what is expected of them in the classroom — an attitude which naturally infringes on the sort of where-curiosity-leads educational style that might enable more intellectual stimulation.”
For all that it has changed over the last half-century, the Naval Academy seems to be lagging behind the changes in war itself. The United States has not fought a conventional war since it ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. Leading military figures like Gen. David Petraeus, the driving force behind the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, argue that today’s wars must be fought not only as military enterprises but also as political and cultural ones. The Navy itself now has an Irregular Warfare Office. But the academy continues to view linguistic or cultural fluency as an add-on or a distraction. Williamson Murray, a distinguished military historian who taught last year at Annapolis, said that the Naval Academy overemphasized technical subjects. The students who stick to engineering, he said, may “make great officers in nuclear submarines,” but “the danger is when they become admiral they will not have the intellectual preparation to handle the world we’re in.” What’s more, the one-fifth or so of graduates who elect to join the Marines have very little use for all those mandatory science classes. Future marines, Murray observed, tend to major in Division III, thus “siphoning off many of those who are going to understand the international environment of the 21st century.”
At the same time, students attracted to history or political science say that they have no trouble satisfying their craving for intellectual challenge and reflection. Murray said that, while he was appalled by the ignorance of the incoming freshmen, he found that the students in one of his senior seminars were “by far and away” superior to those he had taught at Yale and elsewhere in their “level of sophistication, writing ability, understanding of history, capacity to connect the dots between different periods.” These students are just as inclined as good students everywhere to question established wisdom. One professor told me he had polled a group of upperclassmen on the presidential race this past May. He was shocked to read the final tally: Hillary Clinton, 0; the war hero and Navy legend John McCain, 7; Barack Obama, 13. Virtually all of them, he said, took a dim view of the chief architects of the Iraq war (though they continued to respect the commander in chief).
There must have been such students in John McCain’s day; McCain himself might have been one of them. But they were not encouraged to think critically. McCain was forged by a culture of certitudes and offers himself today as a man of steadfast principle, stubborn conviction and a cocky, fighting spirit. Those were the unexamined virtues of his Naval Academy and of his father’s and grandfather’s Naval Academy. But now they are examined; and perhaps today’s elite students feel more comfortable with Barack Obama’s self-questioning than with McCain’s pugnacity and brio. These students live in a world where even vacillation and doubt can at times count as martial virtues.
One veteran professor told me about a case study from the war in Afghanistan that he uses in class. American troops spotted three trucks winding through a mountain pass. When the first two emerged, they were carrying Taliban troops, whom they promptly killed or captured. The third truck was still back in the mountains. A helicopter buzzed up and located it, but it wasn’t clear if this last truck held more Taliban or civilians. The chopper drew within firing range; a figure abruptly stood up in the truck’s bed.
You’re the commanding officer, the professor said: What do you do? Shoot, said almost all the students. Hold your fire, said the few who had seen combat. A mistake, they explained, would not only kill civilians but also jeopardize the larger war effort.
In reality, the commanding officer ordered his men not to shoot; and the truck turned out to be full of women and children. Lesson learned. “When I first came here,” the professor said, “the case studies asked if the right answer was a, b or c. You can only think that way when no one is actually going off to war.” Or perhaps, when no one is going off to the kind of war America now finds itself fighting.
James Traub, a contributing writer, is the author of “The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did).”