I was just about to say…this guy must have tenure, because otherwise they would’ve gotten rid of him a long time ago.
The thing that characterizes his screed, though, is that there is no good evidence nor any hardcore facts or even anecdotes supporting his claims. He claims that taxpayers see no benefit from the service academies without offering any reason for us to believe that. (I counter that there is at least some benefit in having highly trained technical experts, and the service academies overwhelming train engineers and other STEM professionals - even if you don’t believe that having a highly-educated military leadership corps is important.) He says that the academies are not fulfilling their missions or upholding their ideals - but doesn’t give any reason for us to agree with him. He says that the service academies are “the most generous government giveaway going” without providing any figures to support that assertion.
He says that service academy students are not the best and the brightest, but there’s actual evidence to the contrary of that. First of all, SAT scores are not the only or even the most important metric of who are the ‘brightest’ students. That aside, though, data on SAT scores show that the University of Maryland’s middle 50% SAT scores are about on par with all the service academies.* (The absolute mean might be slightly, but not statistically significantly, higher than the academies’.) I’d also like to point out that a score of 600 puts a student in the top 25% of test-takers across the country on both sections; the averages on both sections are closer to a 660 CR and a 680 M, which puts a student in the top 10% of test-takers across the country. So 75% of Naval Academy students are in the top 25% of SAT test-takers across the country, and fully half of them are in the top 10%. Not to mention that the overwhelming majority are in the top quarter of their high school class (with most in the top 10%) and also had to show excellence in athletic and fitness pursuits, leadership activities, and secure a Congressional recommendation. How is that not “the best and the brightest”?
Some of his points are just ridiculous. For example, he complains that students have to take mandatory classes, which is a fact of life at every college. Two of the classes he complains that are unnecessary or won’t be used later are leadership and cybersecurity, which he says is an elementary computer knowledge class. Many colleges require elementary computer classes, though - mine, did, too; you had to take a placement test to get out of it. And…he doesn’t think leadership classes are important for students who are explicitly being trained to be leaders of one the world’s most powerful military forces? I’m also skeptical about his claim that most students don’t come for the experience of going to a service academy. Most students know what they’re getting into when they go to a service academy, and any student who can get into the service academies would also probably be very competitive for an ROTC scholarship at a civilian college or university.
And so it goes - big on opinion and emotion, but short on any evidence to support his claims. I’m not even saying that I necessarily disagree with him; I don’t even know whether I do agree with him, because he hasn’t provided me with anything to really mull over or think about other than “this random English professor who teaches at a service academy thinks they should be shut down.” And then when asked for an alternative, he says this:
So what’s a better alternative to these if the service academies aren’t? Deep Springs, despite its positive portrayal in the recent movie “Ivory Tower,” isn’t it—I know, I taught there a term. Their students are antisocial and rendered comatose by getting up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. The top-flight liberal arts colleges aren’t a solution in themselves either—I graduated from Haverford at age 19, after turning down Ivies, because it felt so stifling. I didn’t like the University of Chicago, my first graduate school, which was controlling—only Vanderbilt, where I got my Ph.D., offered me freedom
Which further just makes him sound like an overall disgruntled, unappeasable person. I hope he doesn’t hope to move on from the naval academy; speaking for myself, if I were in a position to make hiring decisions, I wouldn’t want to hire anyone who had a history of negatively speaking out about every school they’ve ever been associated with without any good reason, particularly if they are going to be a role from which I can’t fire them.
*I think this is more a testament to how talented Maryland’s students are rather than how bad the service academies’ students are.