Change at Annapolis

At christening ceremonies for a new warship, the admiral found himself standing next to a lieutenant commander. Just to make conversation, he asked the younger officer: "What class were you?" The commander grew flustered, stammered that he wasn't an Annapolis man at all. Then it was the admiral's turn to be flustered. He confessed last week: "I had no intention of embarrassing the man. I shouldn't have mentioned class."

Many an old-line Navy officer wouldn't have given it another thought. Rear Admiral James Lemuel Holloway Jr. did. Not long afterwards, Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal put Holloway at the head of a ten-man board (including two civilian educators) to revamp Navy edu. cation. The Navy had realized that it would desperately need officers for the postwar fleet--far more than the Naval Academy could turn out.

The resulting Holloway Plan was at least a step in breaking the Annapolis monopoly on production of career officers, though wartime reservists were ready to bet that the Navy's top commands would still go to "trade school" graduates for a long, long time. This week Admiral Holloway moved into Annapolis as its new (and 35th) superintendent, handpicked for the job by Secretary Forrestal.

At 48, rugged, crisp-voiced Jim Holloway is the Academy's youngest "supe" in 50 years. As a member of one of the speedup classes at Annapolis during World War I, Holloway graduated in 1918, in time to get in a few licks on a World War I destroyer. During World War II he commanded a destroyer squadron in the North African invasion, bossed the battleship JU.S.S. Iowa in a hit-&-run strike on Japan. But Jim Holloway made even more of a mark as a desk admiral. Besides cooking up the postwar education scheme bearing his name, he helped direct demobilization of the swollen Navy, serving as assistant chief of BuPers (Bureau of Naval Personnel). If past averages hold, he'll spend about three years as superintendent.

This week 50,000 high-school seniors, graduates, marines and sailors will take exams for Holloway Plan scholarships. The 5,000 winners will get free educations at 52 civilian colleges and universities and a shot at regular, lifetime Navy commissions. Admiral Holloway predicts that for the next few years regular commissions will be split roughly 50-50 between Academy and Holloway Plan graduates. But he still believes that the Annapolis way is a surer--if tougher--way of making a career out of the Navy.

The Holloway Plan also calls for: 1) equal opportunity for promotion between Annapolis graduates and other officers (on V-J day, there were only two rear admirals and eight commodores up from the reserves, although reserves represented 84.5% of the Navy); 2) a shake-up in Annapolis' way of teaching, "to give a stronger emphasis to basic and general education, rendering more fundamental and less detailed the instruction in strictly naval material and techniques."

A man whose principal recreation is before-breakfast golf, Admiral Holloway has lately developed another: reading books on education and teaching methods. Critics of the Academy hope that from his reading he will find some cure for Annapolis' antiquated system of rote recitation and continuous crams.

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