By MICHAEL NELSON [Claremont Review of Books] – An additional advantage that the academies have over ROTC is their ability to respond swiftly to changing military challenges. Soon after 9/11, Sosh created the Combating Terrorism Center and the academy increased every cadet’s mandatory foreign language training from three days per week to five. Annapolis recently initiated cyber warfare studies and ramped up its own foreign language requirement. These are changes that civilian universities with ROTC units either could not make or have made much more slowly. Samet and other English department faculty teach their classes knowing that “poetry is more important to the cultures with which U.S. troops will come in contact…than it is to our own.” She wants her students to be able to both “handle a grenade launcher and share an appreciation of Rumi with an Afghan colonel.”

The line between military and civilian challenges blurred when Congress forced the academies to incorporate racial minorities in a more than token way in the mid-’60s and, a decade later, to admit women. Absent such pressure, the academies had long dragged their feet when it came to African-Americans and actually dug in their heels against women. But when the orders came down from the civilian authorities, the chain of command moved to execute the mission. Gelfand quotes Ellen Seashore, the Naval Academy’s advisor on women’s integration: “Some male officers were not for the change. But their jobs depended on it, so any disagreement was kept to themselves.” Midshipmen were slower to adjust than their officers, and Gelfand reports that as recently as 1990 only 59% of the women at Annapolis believed that male midshipmen accepted their presence. By 1996, after a concerted effort by the academy’s leadership, that number had risen to 95%.

Continued at the Claremont Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.