Naval Academy Ponders Its Course in Troubled Waters

April is a time of excitement here. The spring sun has brightened the gray-brown buildings on the U.S. Naval Academy campus, and the midshipmen are eagerly getting ready for commissioning ceremonies next month. As it has for 150 years, the school is preparing to send another crop of naval officers--some of them future admirals--into the fleet.

But this past weekend, the mood is somber and unsettled. On orders from the top brass, the middies are in the middle of a weeklong “stand-down”--restricted to the campus and relieved of all duties, except to ponder how to end a spate of humiliating scandals that has tarnished the institution’s prestige.

“It’s an SOS call of sorts,” one Navy insider explained.

The academy may not be foundering, but it certainly is in troubled waters. Over the past 3 1/2 years, it has suffered a series of embarrassing incidents ranging from a cheating episode involving 133 midshipmen to a string of sexual assaults and drug busts.

In the past three weeks alone, a midshipman was arrested for alleged sexual assault on four female students and a second was charged with molesting a toddler; two seniors were accused of breaking and entering and another was indicted (along with four former middies) on charges of running a car-theft ring--a stunning violation even if it had occurred at a civilian college.

The incidents have fueled a debate, not only about the academy and how it is run, but over whether the troubles now reflect a wider sickness that has permeated much of the Navy’s top leadership as well.

“It’s very difficult to teach ethics in an environment when . . . you see the top leaders in your service engage in doublespeak, when you know that what they’re saying is not the truth,” said James H. Webb, former Navy secretary and Naval Academy graduate, citing the Tailhook debacle as only one example.

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“The problem with the academy is partly a problem with the Navy writ large,” he said.

Painfully, the latest barrage of incidents comes just as the academy’s own rescue effort--led by Supt. Charles R. Larson, the four-star admiral who was called in after the 1992 cheating scandal to help get the badly battered institution back on course--is beginning to take hold.

Under a mandate to restore the institution’s once ironclad ethical standards, Larson has appointed a “character development officer” and instituted a spate of new programs designed to imbue midshipmen with a heightened sense of morality and integrity.

He has also tightened academy discipline, revoking some student privileges--particularly for younger midshipmen--that critics had regarded as too permissive.

Further, enforcement of the academy’s longtime honor system has been returned to the student honor boards, whose expulsion recommendations for cheating had sometimes in recent years been overruled by the superintendent.

Even some of the academy’s severest critics praise Larson’s efforts. Richard L. Armitage, a former assistant secretary of Defense who headed a blue-ribbon commission that issued a negative report about the school’s previous administration, says the admiral “has done a pretty good job.”

But the changes appear to be short of the mark or slow in taking hold. Indeed, the parade of transgressions has been so stunning this spring that Larson and his top aides have had to spend much of their time defending the institution. (Interviews with students were canceled after this week’s stand-down began.)

Just what is causing the raft of incidents is puzzling--and a subject of debate.

Larson, for one, dismisses them as “unconnected aberrations.” Reorienting a 4,000-person brigade can easily take years, the admiral insists--more than the two years that he has had to work with the current student body.

Retired Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, former chief of naval operations, voices a frequently proffered view that the problems at the academy merely reflect a more general breakdown in society--with many parents now failing to “instill in their children the honor and the integrity that we used to see.”

Indeed, military officials report that all the major service academies are finding that today’s young people do not have the sense of right and wrong that previous classes did. Instead, they seem to believe that anything goes, as long as it is technically legal. And they are far more apt to tolerate wrongdoing by others.

But those explanations do not deal with the culture of the academy and of the Navy itself. According to some critics, this is one reason the problem has been so intractable.

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The most scathing indictment of this kind has come from a civilian professor at the academy, James F. Barry, who wrote a bluntly worded Washington Post op-ed page piece earlier this month citing a “culture of hypocrisy” at the academy that “tolerates sexual harassment, favoritism and . . . covering up.”

Among Barry’s charges:

* The academy’s boot-camp atmosphere treats midshipmen like children for much of their stay, depriving them of an opportunity to exercise self-discipline and inhibiting their maturation. “We should put them in a role where they have to take responsibility for their actions, not just survive a fat rule book,” he said.

* The disciplinary system--combined with what Barry contends is a refusal to tolerate mistakes--discourages midshipmen from reporting infractions such as drug abuse or sexual harassment and teaches them that anything goes if you can get away with it. For years, the middies have followed an unwritten code: “Don’t bilge [tell on] your classmate.”

* The school’s propensity for providing special privileges--and disciplinary leniency--for athletes leads other students to wonder why they should hew a stricter line. The school is too hung up on fielding a top-caliber football team and ought to consider de-emphasizing varsity sports.

To the tougher critics, it is no coincidence that some of the same telltale characteristics show up in the Navy’s broader scandals. The 1991 Tailhook scandal, the battleship Iowa explosion in 1989 and the downing of an Iranian airliner by the cruiser Vincennes in 1988 all showed a tendency to put group loyalty ahead of honesty, to shield wrongdoing and to close ranks against outside criticism, they say.

Larson insists that most of the problems that Barry cited are being addressed. Others are doubtful. “The academy simply isn’t paying attention adequately,” one graduate complained.

Larson did not assuage such fears when his first response to the Barry article was to remove the professor from any teaching duties and deliver a series of tirades about disloyalty. Since then, however, the admiral has reversed himself and allowed Barry to return to the classroom.

To be sure, Annapolis is not the only service academy that has encountered such problems. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was hit by major cheating scandals in the 1950s and the late 1970s, forcing a thorough revamping of its own honor standards. And the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colo., recently suffered a major sexual harassment incident.

Some officers contend that the Naval Academy’s difficulties have received more attention because Annapolis is so close to Washington, which has a large concentration of news organizations.

Even so, even Larson admits the latest barrage of incidents has been extraordinary, and critics point out that there are important differences between the approach the Naval Academy has taken and the way the other service academies are run.

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Both West Point and the Air Force Academy, for example, have had more comprehensive honor codes, which not only demand that cadets follow the rules but also require that they report anyone who does not. Both have far more military officers on their faculties, to provide role models for cadets. And both relax their boot-camp-style atmosphere earlier in the game.

Don M. Snider, a former Army colonel serving as a defense analyst, argues that the Naval Academy would do well to adopt similar practices, including assigning more top-quality junior officers to serve as instructors--and role models.

Brookings Institution defense expert Lawrence J. Korb agrees. “Just putting Larson in there is not good enough,” he said.

It’s too early to say just how the Naval Academy will bail itself out of the latest round of difficulties. The next step will come on Tuesday, when the stand-down ends and midshipmen are expected to come up with suggestions for improving the academy’s moral climate. After that, it will be the superintendent’s turn to act again.

Just the same, the betting here is that more course changes are likely before the academy’s reputation begins to shine as brightly as its campus has this past weekend. “You’re looking at the Naval Academy now in a state of great flux,” Armitage said.