Neither Athens nor Sparta?: The American Service Academies in Transition

by John P. Lovell

Published by Indiana University Press

362 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Roger Burk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will not be to everyone's taste--it has the feel of a doctoral dissertation, flogging every last bit of possible insight out of a narrowly defined research problem. But it offers an interesting snapshot of the state of the US service academies (notably including the Coast Guard) as of the mid-1970s. This was around the end of a quarter century of critical change. Before the end of WWII, the academies were what Lovell describes as "seminary academies," small enough to operate largely on tradition and personal relationships. They had "lockstep curricula," with all students taking identical courses, regardless of interests or previous college work. The primary mission was socializing the cadets and midshipmen into an officer brotherhood. Accordingly, the faculties were largely serving military officers, often without any college beyond their own academy education. Three things propelled change: several cheating scandals in the 1950s and 60s that cast doubt on the ability of the traditional system to do the job if instilling institutional values (that being the justification for the strict programs); the need for wider learning among military officers that was revealed in WWII and the Cold War; and the founding of the Air Force Academy in 1954, which provided an opportunity for some innovative experiments. By the time of writing of this book, the academies had started offering a wide selection of elective courses, regular academic majors, and well-educated and partly civilian faculties. The academies had also roughly doubled in size. Because of that, and because of a need to address continuing problems in discipline and retention, they had also become much more bureaucratic and rule-bound. However, problems with cheating and with graduate retention in service had continued (and retention continues to be an issue today, at least at West Point, where I teach).

In the last chapter, Lovell makes some bold recommendations and predictions. He clearly favors bold change, with the academies becoming two-year postgraduate institutions instead of four-year undergraduate. He does not see much loss in removing intercollegiate athletics from the program, from the smaller scope for cadet/midshipman leadership training, or from trying to instill institutional values in older and less impressionable students. Lovell does say that "bold incrementalism" is more likely than such a radical change, due to the resistance of hidebound traditionalists. However, none of the elements of his "bold incrementalism" program happened either. Finally, he confesses that "cautious incrementalism" is the most likely of all, and many of his predictions in this category have come to pass, notably the increased leadership and athletic prominence of female students.