West Point & All That

To hear some people tell it, a modern U.S. military man should study Kafka as well as Clausewitz, since the terrain he must now operate in is more like Kafka's maze than Clausewitz's certainties. In a day of allies, proxy battles and limited wars, the military needs a whole new technical arsenal--politics, diplomacy, science, economics--to enable it to employ precise degrees of power in imprecise situations. All this asks of U.S. officers unprecedented competence, character and wisdom.

It also raises sharp questions about the quality of U.S. service academies, says David Boroff, 45, professor of English at New York University and the nation's liveliest critic-inspector of colleges and universities (Campus, U.S.A.). "As sympathetically as possible," World War II Veteran Boroff (corporal, Army Intelligence) set out last winter to scrutinize West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy. The current Harper's publishes his third and final report: a blast at service academy education as so full of "narcissistic preening" that it may be too unreal for the real world.

Boroff finds that "surprisingly good" students flock to the academies. But something goes wrong, he thinks, when they get there. At "rambunctiously adolescent" Annapolis, senior essays run to such topics as "A History of Varsity Cross Country at the U.S.N.A." At austere West Point, cadets are "bright, dutiful boys with a conventional cast of mind." At the Air Academy, "even the bright cadets did not seem different from the duller ones; they all inhabited the same constricted intellectual and moral universe."

"Brother Rat Mentality." At West Point, cadets do not major in subjects; the curriculum (60% science and engineering) is broken into little units of information. Having completed each step, says Boroff, cadets have no incentive to probe further, particularly in humanities. Nor have they time: the "awesome" academic load is some 21 class hours a week, plus military training and compulsory athletics. Worse, says Boroff, most of the 358-man faculty (only 14 have doctorates) are short-tour officers who tend to follow canned lesson plans. Says Boroff: "Academically, West Point is a second-class college for first-class students."

"Less flamboyantly spartan," Annapolis allows midshipmen to take majors and uses civilian professors in academic departments. But all department heads are naval officers ("often uninformed"), who come and go every three years. Tackling this problem, the Navy is now out to find Annapolis a civilian academic dean "of national rank." Boroff is not sanguine about the "Brother Rat mentality" at Annapolis, where foreign language study (a first-rate department) is known as "dago," and the catch-all department of English, history and government is called the "Bull Department."

"Disneyland East." In contrast, vocational training is underplayed at the Air Academy in Colorado Springs--an 18,000-acre complex (50 times bigger than the Naval Academy) that the other academies scornfully nickname "Disneyland East." The Air Academy gives no flying instruction, has even stopped graduating cadets as navigators. More flexible than its sister schools, it was the first to introduce majors, "enrichment" courses for ambitious cadets, and the start of an M.A. program --all the kind of thing that Boroff wants. Humanities comprise 50% of the curriculum. Cadets can learn about Picasso, Kandinsky, Bartok and Schonberg, even do some painting. The faculty "seems the best of the lot" (21% with doctorates), says Boroff, and it has an open mind. If a cadet argued "effectively'' that nuclear war is unthinkable, says one instructor, "he would get an A."

Last year the Air Academy produced three Rhodes scholars; only Harvard got more. But to Boroff the old problem remains: short-tour faculty men "teaching by the numbers." and cadets learning the same way. "Cadet culture has a Boy Scout flavor," says Boroff: One cadet insisted. for example, that nuclear weapons should be used in Viet Nam "to clear the terrain so that guerrillas can be spotted."

"It is the estrangement from civilian life at all the academies that I find most disturbing." says Boroff. but he is far from agreeing with Admiral Rickover that they probably should be abolished. Boroff prescribes more independent study and time for cadets to read and educate themselves (a cherished custom in the prewar services ). To encourage brilliance, he even suggests a separate academy for training intellectual "philosopher-warriors."

The academies have remained officially silent to Boroff's criticism, as if afraid to blurt out what they felt. But there will obviously be gnashing of teeth among the ring-knockers who have graduated. They might well reply that, even in the nuclear age, the academies' purpose is not Harvard's or Yale's or Princeton's. But their answer will probably be more characteristically visceral: that they know their own business and Boroff does not.

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