THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 25, 1996 TAG: 9605250499
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ANNAPOLIS, MD. LENGTH: 197 lines
It was a perfect day for celebrating, with a beautiful blue sky overhead and the warm pride of 10,000 moms, dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, fiancees, brothers and sisters filling Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
So celebrate they did here Friday morning. Hugging each other, tossing high-fives, and showing off smiles as bright as their dress whites, 917 U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen marked the end of their academic careers and took their oaths as military officers.
``With intensity, intelligence and integrity, you have earned the rank that you will wear today,'' Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told them. ``I am proud, and America is blessed, to have you.''
The picture-perfect ceremony, begun with a dramatic fly-over by the Navy's Blue Angels precision pilots and capped by the graduating mids' traditional toss of their hats into the air, brought a hopeful end to four turbulent years for the academy and a tragic week for the Navy.
The class of '96 came to Annapolis in September 1992, as the full, embarrassing scope of a cheating scandal that broke the previous winter was becoming apparent. It graduates after an unsettling spring of auto theft and drug busts, sexual-harassment allegations against one of its highest-ranking members, and the publication of a veteran teacher's searing indictment of the academy's moral climate.
Shalikashvili took note of those troubles only briefly but warned the graduates that they must build their military careers on a foundation of integrity.
``You cannot, for long, fool the sailors or Marines under your command,'' he said. ``If your are dishonest with them, they will know it. But if you are honest with them, if you are fair, if you look out for them when the chips are down, their trust, their belief in you will mean the difference between victory and defeat.''
Friday's ceremony came after a heartbreaking week for the Navy, which on Tuesday said a final goodbye to its chief of operations, Adm. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda. The first sailor to rise from the enlisted ranks to command of the Navy, Boorda committed suicide shortly before he was to face two reporters' questions about the validity of military decorations he once wore.
Navy and academy leaders were determined not to let Boorda's death cast a pall over Friday's ceremony, but also not to let it go unremembered.
``No one is perfect - not you, not me, not the CNO,'' Navy Secretary John H. Dalton told the graduates. ``We all have done things we're not proud of.'' His advice to them was to remember Boorda's contributions to the service and to ``learn from the past, without dwelling on it.''
Similar advice concerning the academy itself was offered - and accepted - liberally around the yard this week as graduation approached. In interviews, mids and their families argued that the school's problems, and the Navy's, have been blown out of proportion by journalists.
``Everything that you've seen just shows that the system works,'' said John Sarno, a Williamsburg resident who on Friday was sworn in as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. ``There's so much good this school does, it's just incredible.''
``We've been through the worst of it. We're coming back,'' said Mark Meade of West Lafayette, Ind., who will graduate in 1997. ``The academy is still looked at by thousands - millions - of people as a respectable institution. Where we were about a month ago, we are just stories above that now.''
``I'm impressed every time I come here,'' said Steve DeLong of Benton Harbor, Mich., whose son, Chris, also was among Friday's graduates. ``For this place to stay out of the papers, it would have to be perfect.''
Many mids argue that the publication March 31 of an essay by James Barry, an assistant professor in the academy's leadership department, gave the school an image it doesn't deserve. They say he accurately described some of the school's problems but gave the superintendent, Adm. Charles Larson, too little credit for attempting to fix them.
``Adm. Larson knows about the problems and has been trying to do something about the problems,'' said David Joseforsky of Crown Point, Ind., who will be a first classman, orsenior, at the academy this fall.
``You're not going to change the problems that are around here in the year, two years he's been here. It's going to take a good four years to focus on the problems that Professor Barry talked about,'' Joseforsky said.
At Larson's direction, and largely at the suggestion of mids, the academy has implemented a new character-development program, tightened restrictions on members of the brigade venturing out into Annapolis, and given the mids more power to enforce standards of behavior.
Larson gets high marks from many mids for putting extra emphasis on the development of leadership skills they will be expected to use as naval officers. Some critics argue that part of the academy's problem is that it has moved away from its core mission as a training ground for military men and has become more of a civilian university.
When he was a plebe, the academy put heavy emphasis on training mids in the ``total quality leadership'' management techniques that have transformed manufacturing around the world, Sarno said. Now, there's more emphasis on traditional military skills and ethics.
In that vein, Larson is looking to hire a leadership coordinator to study improvements in the academy's Leadership, Ethics and Law Department. And he wants to develop a master's program at the Naval Postgraduate School to upgrade the skills of company officers and leadership instructors.
In his essay, Barry wrote of ``a culture of cynicism'' he said pervades academy life, the result of what he called ``an ethically corrupt system'' that ``tolerates sexual harassment, favoritism and the covering up of problems.''
``We are getting the same high-quality applicants as always,'' he wrote. ``But it doesn't take long before they absorb what they see around them and figure out what appears to be a path to success both at the academy and in the Navy at large. Some of the mids have even codified this into an informal Rules of the Road. . . .
`` The administration is the enemy.
`` The system is basically punitive.
`` You must always be perfect, mistakes aren't allowed.
`` Loyalty is more important than truth.
`` Trust only a few close friends.
`` The consequences of telling the truth may be worse than those of lying.
`` Officers who stick up for their troops get ranked the lowest by the administration.
`` Don't raise questions or suggest improvements, because nothing will come of it and you will just get in trouble.''
The academy's first response, and one still much in evidence here Friday, was to defend itself.
Adm. Larson, who delayed his retirement to answer's Boorda's plea for help in reforming the school after the cheating scandal, first yanked Barry from the classroom and complained that he'd been betrayed by the teacher. Barry became a pariah; an edition of the student newspaper, The Trident, published 12 days after Barry's essay appeared in The Washington Post, reported extensively on Larson's response to the attack but never mentioned Barry by name.
An attack like Barry's ``smears, tarnishes all of us,'' an angry Cmdr. Pat Walsh, who as chairman of the academy's leadership department is Barry's boss, said at the time. He had heard Barry's concerns, relayed them up the chain of command and was working to address them when the essay appeared, Walsh said.
``I could not be here, I could not come to this place, if I thought it was ethically corrupt,'' added Walsh, who was brought in to run and revamp the academy's leadership program just two months before Barry's essay was published.
But with other faculty, including some who openly differed with Barry's views, complaining about his treatment, Barry was returned to class. At Larson's request, he went to work on a report that further outlined his concerns and offered 22 suggestions for improvement.
Attached to the report were some 800 pages of letters, notes and electronic mail messages Barry said he had received from mids and academy graduates in the wake of his essay. Those notes haven't been released, but they suggest ``the (negative) views are not mine alone,'' Barry said in his report.
In an interview last month, Jeffrey McFadden, an Annapolis lawyer and academy graduate who three years ago sat on a committee reviewing the school's honor code, said the atmosphere Barry described has been present for years.
Barry's observations ``are not anecdotal. They're not aberrations. They're not the sentiments of just a few bad apples,'' McFadden asserted.
McFadden argued that Barry's essay reflects a ``bad-boy subculture'' in the Navy that he said has seeped into the academy. The prevailing ethic is ``you rate what you skate,'' a popular expression among mids that essentially means miscreants can excel so long as they're not caught.
Such sentiments notwithstanding, the academy's board of visitors declared after a May 13 meeting that ``the sweeping assertions of institutional decay alleged by Professor Barry are not supported by our observations or by the vast amount of information available to us.''
Barry ``is more out of touch with what is going on in general than he would like you to believe,'' Professor Roger D. Little, president of the academy's Faculty Senate, said in a mid-April interview. He and several mids interviewed last week took particular exception to Barry's assertion that the academy is run by fear and that mids are overstressed.
Mids who stand up to turn in their classmates and enforce the academy's honor code are not looked down on or regarded as snitches, Meade said. ``People know if they do something wrong and they keep doing it, they're going to get caught and somebody will do something about it.''
``If I were fearful, I wouldn't be here speaking with you . . .'' Little told a reporter. ``I don't see this as being a place that stifles either faculty or midshipmen.''
``This is a stressful environment,'' he added later. ``We're trying to establish that these people can perform well in stressful situations. I think the quality of the student in general is better than the ones that were coming in during the Vietnam era.''
While rejecting Barry's view of the academy, Larson and the board agreed to one of his key suggestions, announcing that an independent consultant will be brought in to assess the quality of life for midshipmen and recommend improvements.
Retired Rear Adm. Benjamin Montoya, the board's chairman, stressed that the academy's troubles this spring involved only a relative handful of the 4,000 students in the brigade.
``The few individuals involved clearly brought discredit to the academy, but the school will move beyond these actions,'' he said.
Mids and their parents around the yard last week agreed. ``Ninety-nine percent of us are doing great,'' said Charles W. Mayer III, a class of '96 member who said he and his classmates were ``mostly just frustrated'' this spring as a series of arrests of mids on drug, auto theft and sex assault charges made headlines almost daily.
``The friends he brings home - they're good kids,'' said Mayer's father, a Navy captain and academy graduate himself. ``From a parent's perspective, I couldn't be happier.''
Though full of praise for the mids Friday, Shalikashvili cautioned the graduates and perhaps the academy's leadership and followers against the impulse to become defensive in the face of criticism.
``Those of us who choose to wear America's uniform, choose as well to live by a higher code of conduct,'' he said, ``and to surrender ourselves to public scrutiny. And that is entirely proper, for America entrusts the lives of its sons and daughters into our care, and America has a right to demand a full accounting of our stewardship.''
Critics have an obligation to be fair, he added, but ``constructive criticism, when honestly and wisely sifted, will make us strong. So learn from criticism, stay open, grow stronger, and don't fall into the trap of becoming defensive, of circling your wagons against the imaginary enemies outside. That will only weaken you.''
KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY GRADUATION by CNB