Babylon Comes to Sparta: Have our service academies gotten too modern?

Earlier this year, the history faculty on a Maryland campus met to hear a young colleague discuss a paper he was writing. The author hoped to receive feedback and eventually publish his work in a scholarly journal. His topic was the invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945. The junior professor argued that the battle, in which nearly 7,000 Marines lost their lives, was a strategic mistake. Moreover, he said, it was predicated on racial hatred: American forces struck at the island not because it was home to an important air base, but because they wanted to kill a bunch of Nips.

This was nonsense. Iwo Jima was a necessary target whose capture served U.S. interests if only because it became a vital landing strip for B-29 bombers. The fact that a professor would make such a claim should startle nobody, however. The modern academy places a premium on revisionism and believes that much of American history should be viewed through the distorted lens of race. The surprising part is that this paper was delivered at the U.S. Naval Academy, and its author was a captain in the Marines.

The Naval Academy has endured its share of controversies, from organized cheating and crime-ring scandals among the midshipmen to, most recently, the sudden resignation of its superintendent in June. Yet one of its most significant problems has been all but ignored: the clout of civilian professors, who threaten to turn key parts of a unique institution into something not much different from an ordinary college. The situation at the Naval Academy in Annapolis has become bad enough that people closely associated with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs worry about what they call the "Annapolization" of their schools.

In the American imagination, the service academies are mythic places that have produced a long roster of heroes, from Ulysses S. Grant to Douglas MacArthur. Yet they've had critics from the start-or, more accurately, from before the start. In 1783, Alexander Hamilton declared that "the benefit of such institutions rarely compensates for the expense-the military knowledge is best acquired in service." This was almost two decades before the first academy, the one at West Point, was founded in 1802.

Many of the arguments remain unchanged two centuries later. Recent assessments show that it can cost the Pentagon more than $300,000 to mint new officers at the service academies, which is far more than it takes to produce them through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS). The end product isn't necessarily better, either. Most officers say that it's impossible to distinguish between those who went to the academies and those who didn't. Of the five current members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (there are usually six, but the Army chief recently resigned), only one is an academy grad.

Meanwhile, the service academies experience closer scrutiny than any other undergraduate institution in America-partly because they fall under the jurisdiction of Congress, but also because each is near a major media market full of aggressive reporters eager to engage in ideological battle over topics such as gender integration. An allegation of sexual harassment at a service academy will earn a hundred times more attention than proof of the same thing elsewhere. As a result, there have been many calls to "civilianize" the service academies. This can be healthy-and it has been healthy-when done the right way. Yet some of the motivation springs from a belief that there's something wrong with military culture and that the proper corrective is to infuse it with values held by society writ large: If only 19-year-old fighter-jock wannabes attend enough sensitivity seminars, they'll accept their female peers as fellow warriors and admit them into the band of brothers. Advocates of this approach usually believe that without a draft putting ordinary Americans into uniform, citizens and soldiers risk drifting too far apart. But the current threat at the service academies is exactly the reverse. They risk looking and behaving too much like the rest of America.

One of the aims of a general education is to teach students how to think on their own. A military education, on the other hand, requires officers-in-the-making to absorb the stern discipline of accepting orders without questioning them. Which isn't to say the academies don't try to have both-or that they take the same route getting there. One of the biggest differences among them is the role of civilian professors: At the Naval Academy, civilians make up about half of the faculty, compared to 22 percent at West Point and 26 percent at the Air Force Academy. This disparity is more than numerical. At Annapolis, the civilian professors wield far more power than their counterparts elsewhere. For one thing, they can gain tenure-something no professor at West Point or the Air Force Academy has ever received. They also serve as deans and department heads and have much more freedom to design their courses and pick their textbooks.

Controlling new hires is a major perk as well, with civilian job candidates at the Naval Academy likely to be interviewed almost exclusively by civilians already on the faculty. The opposite is true at West Point and the Air Force Academy. "We think it's a little bit unhealthy how the Naval Academy goes about this," says Col. Hans Mueh, vice dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy. At Annapolis, the result is a civilian faculty that looks much like the faculties found on non- military campuses. "There's a striking lack of ideological diversity here," says one Naval Academy professor. "Most of the civilian professors actually opposed the war against Iraq." This, at a place devoted to teaching the next generation of warfighters.

Although the permanent civilian professors at the Naval Academy are formally subordinate to an active-duty superintendent, they wield a tremendous amount of additional influence because they play a major role in writing the "fitness reports" that help shape futures in the military. A negative one can damage a career-and the fear of receiving one may explain why a Marine captain in the history department would be so eager to please that he'd write a paper on how the Iwo Jima offensive was a hate crime.

There's a strong case to be made for having civilians comprise a portion of the faculty at the service academies. Almost all of them have Ph.D.'s, whereas the rotating military professors generally possess only master's degrees and sometimes have but a cursory knowledge of the subjects they're supposed to teach. (There are also permanent military professors-known as PMPs, or "pimps"-who have doctorates, but they are outnumbered by their temporary juniors.) In addition, seeing civilians in positions of authority prepares students for professional assignments, at the Pentagon and elsewhere, that will require them to take direction from people not in uniform.

The civilians also serve as conduits of new information. "They give us fresh exposure to the latest ideas in their fields," says Col. George B. Forsythe, the vice dean for education at West Point. When the subject is nuclear engineering, this can carry great value. But sometimes it's postmodern literary theory. "The problem is simple," says Seth Cropsey, former Navy deputy undersecretary. "The academic world is controlled by the Left, so of course you'd see it at the Naval Academy."

The question, then, is how to integrate the civilian professors without importing P.C. attitudes. "I think we've struck a good balance here," says one civilian professor at West Point. "We're a military academy with a few civilians, not a regular college with a few people hanging around in uniform." Having a large number of empowered civilian professors begins to change this. "There's a tremendous fear that Annapolis will be seen as a model for the other schools," says Stephen Knott, who taught at the Air Force Academy for seven years. It's not an invented concern: In the 1990s, Congress came close to passing mandates that would have required West Point and the Air Force Academy to have equal numbers of civilian and military faculty-in short, to Annapolize.

The pressure continues today; many believe that officers belong not in the classroom but in the field. That sounds reasonable, except that active-duty professors are vital to the formation of future officers. They serve as both role models and instructors. "I took a class on the Korean and Vietnam Wars," says Daniel Jablonsky, a 1991 Naval Academy graduate who spent a semester at West Point on an exchange program. "There's nothing like learning that history from a guy who was a platoon leader in Korea and a battalion commander in Vietnam."

Military professors infuse the service academies with an ethos civilians simply can't. This is the culture that makes the academies different from other undergraduate institutions: "a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon," as Samuel Huntington has put it. As good as civilian professors can be, they are ambassadors from Babylon. They perform an important function, but it is a limited one. If their presence grows beyond proper limits, the academies will lose their very reason for being. They will be Annapolized-and destroyed.