Navy Panel Seeks to Expel 29 in Cheating Scandal

A board of senior naval officers on Thursday recommended the expulsion of 29 midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy and disciplinary actions against 42 others for their involvement in the largest cheating scandal in the school’s 148-year history.

The panel, known as the Honor Review Board, cleared 35 other midshipmen of any wrongdoing in the December, 1992, incident. The recommendations now go to the chief of naval operations, Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, and ultimately to Navy Secretary John H. Dalton for action.

The case has rocked the normally staid academy and raised questions about how effectively it is administering its longstanding honor code, which forbids midshipmen to cheat or lie. The code is considered a mainstay of officer training.

The Navy inspector general’s office had concluded in a separate review that 133 students--all of them second-classmen, or college juniors--had obtained advance copies of an electrical engineering exam administered to 663 midshipmen.

The course, Electric Engineering 331, was said to be one of the most difficult at the academy and was a prerequisite for graduation.

The document said that although 81 students ultimately admitted to cheating, most of them “repeatedly” lied during an initial investigation. And it charged that the academy did not act quickly enough to look into allegations of a possible cover-up.

Thursday’s recommendations capped almost a year of investigations, first by the academy itself and later by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, midshipmen-run honor boards, the academy’s board of visitors and the Navy inspector general’s office.

Richard L. Armitage, a former U.S. ambassador and a member of the board of visitors who took part in that investigation, said the incident showed that “the tradition of honor at the academy has been on the back burner.”

The academy’s superintendent, Rear Adm. Thomas C. Lynch, a onetime Naval Academy football player, was exonerated by Dalton of accusations that he gave preferential treatment to members of the football team accused of cheating.

Lynch already has expelled six of the 133 students who had been implicated in the scandal. The remaining 21 not covered by that action or Thursday’s recommendations either have been cleared of any charges, have resigned or have been disciplined in other ways.

Thursday’s recommendations did not address the unanswered question of how the students obtained copies of the exam. The inspector general’s report in January quoted one student as saying a football player had received a copy from a professor.

One troubling factor for the Navy is the apparent failure of those who knew about the incident to report it to superior officers, as the honor code requires. Earlier investigations found that many midshipmen viewed the code as an abstract goal, not a genuine standard.

Navy officials said Thursday that the academy now was trying to strengthen adherence to the honor code, which Lynch and other officials conceded had not been emphasized as much recently as in previous years.