The Midshipman Culture and Educational Reform: The U.S. Naval Academy 1946-76 (review)

About thirty years ago, during registration for a history symposium at the Naval Academy, a navy commander in uniform greeted Peter Karsten with the remark, "Oh! You're the author of the book with the red cover." The insinuation was that somehow Karsten's masterpiece, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism (1972), smacked of communist viewpoints. The commander's slur graphically demonstrated the navy's ingrained hostility to serious critical analysis of the academy and its graduates. The Midshipman Culture and Educational Reform, which can be seen as something of a sequel to Karsten, will not encounter a similar reaction.

Todd A. Forney, Naval Academy Class of 1986, has written a sympathetic narrative of the successive academic reforms that began with the tentative introduction into the curriculum of electives in 1959 and culminated a decade later with Superintendent James Calvert's directive requiring all midshipmen to major in an academic subject. In the 1960s and 1970s the professional qualifications of the civilian faculty were radically elevated, and a phalanx of modern academic buildings was erected beside the Severn River. At the same time, the heavier academic burden placed on midshipmen and the desire to attract highly qualified applicants in a time of great change in American society led to amelioration of the more medieval features of the year-long Plebe indoctrination system. Improvements were also made to the quality of life in Bancroft Hall, where 4,000 midshipmen sleep, eat, and endure various forms of harassment intended to build military character.

This is a very conservative book. Its assessments rest to a large extent on the decadal evaluations of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Highly critical and skeptical in 1946, the evaluators in 1976 concluded that the academy had indeed become a true college with respectable and varied academic programs. The story of the intervening years told by Forney is of a vessel on a steady course, not one zigzagging in hostile waters. Perhaps as a result of this linear portrayal, it is difficult to grasp the exact nature and significance of many of the jargon-encrusted incremental reforms, especially those pertaining to Plebe Year and Bancroft Hall.

Exactly why the author terminated his study at 1976 is impossible to fathom. That year marked the revolutionary admission of female midshipmen to the Plebe class. Forney correctly observes, "Certainly no other event suggested such a traumatic shock to the all-male culture of Annapolis" (p. 17). In the minds of many of the alumni whom he surveyed, "this change poisoned everything the older system accomplished and the academy was forever changed as a result. It is because of perceptions like these that I ended my study in 1976 rather than include women in it" (p. 17).

This regrettable decision led to unfortunate results for the book. First, the outrage of those who attended the Naval Academy prior to 1976 determined the chronological boundaries of the study of the institution rather than having scholarly purpose define those perimeters. Secondly, the book simply ignores one of the great social and institutional dramas of modern American military history. In the year before Congress mandated admission of women to the service academies Annapolis was preparing to fight their entry in the courts. The charismatic and gifted retired Rear Admiral Robert W. McNitt (USNA, '38) was orchestrating the resistance; when Congress ordered the academy's gates opened to women, he became the officer in charge of developing the admission procedures. This transformation demonstrates the kind of loyalty to higher authority that Forney contends Annapolis engenders, and it is only one small scene in a drama sadly not recounted.

Finally, by not including the admission of women and at least the first decade of their experience as midshipmen, Forney has rendered a real disservice to fellow...