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The Place of the Humanities at a Military Academy
How do you make cadets better officers? Take them to the opera.
By Lucretia A. Flammang
When I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, the Army ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) building was set on fire. Several days later, an ROTC officer reported in a letter to the editor of the Daily Californian, the student newspaper, that the fire had consumed his copy of Chaucer and all his Chaucer notes. He wrote not to complain, but to explain himself. There was something of the ecce homo in his argument. He might very well have said, "Here I am, a man who can study both the arts of war and the arts of humanity and find no contradiction in the acts."
If we, his readers, were surprised, we stood accused of both ignorance and bigotry. After all, the letter implicitly asked, why would we imagine that military officers are incapable of cherishing their copies of Chaucer, if indeed we imagined they owned a copy in the first place? The article forced an uncomfortable recognition in me. I, too, was an officer in the military, enrolled in the MA program in English literature, and yet even I struggled to reconcile the ROTC officer's position as both military trainer and student of the humanities. Herein, I believe, lies the difficulty inherent in teaching the humanities at a military academy. In our culture circulates a belief that military service is incongruous with an appreciation for the arts, a belief to which I also subscribed until that ROTC officer set before me the ashes of his Chaucer. Up to then, I had seen myself as singular, not only because I wanted to study literature, but also because I was a woman in uniform, which at that time was considered outside the military norm. But, suddenly, I had to reconsider what the norm might be.
My own experiences provided plenty of evidence to refute any assertion that the norm precluded love of the humanities. I regularly talked about Shakespeare with my first operations officer, who had been an English major at the University of Connecticut. Peers in the wardroom introduced me to Western and Eastern writers I had never heard of. When I was a senior at the Coast Guard Academy, I encountered two classmates who had read Thomas Hardy, whom I had only just discovered and whose novels inspired me to pursue advanced study in English literature. So where did I get the idea that military officers eschewed the arts?
Popular Culture
The answer to this question is complicated and derives in part from the prevailing cultural images of the military in the past three decades, which by and large have been produced visually in the popular media. In films such as Platoon, Casualties of War, and Full Metal Jacket, the audience is expected to identify with an Everyman who prevails against both a sadistic trainer and the enemy in combat. Sometimes morally ambiguous and always flawed, our hero nevertheless leads us through a labyrinth of military traditions and the chaos of battle, his masculinity tested and defined in every conflict. In identifying with these men, the viewer comes to see them as indicative of the military. War demands aggressiveness and strength, and while Vietnam shook our faith in the nobility of men in war, more recent films, such as Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, reassert the ideal of the good Everyman whose self-sacrifice for others stands as the highest ideal.
Notably, these films narrate stories of mortal combat, depicting masculinity in the most trying of human circumstances. Women are rarely represented exercising individual agency. They are understood as related to men, whether as mothers, wives, or sexual objects. When women are the center of the narrative, their characters reinforce, rather than challenge, the predominant image that associates the military with a particular form of masculinity. Goldie Hawn's Private Benjamin is laughably unsuited to military rigors; America's Sweetheart, Meg Ryan, demonstrates no authority despite the way she barks her orders in Courage Under Fire; and Demi Moore may be G. I. Jane, but she is built like G. I. Joe.
As a whole, these films suggest an ideal of masculinity that values action over thought. Exceptions can be found, of course—for example, in director Terrence Malick's adaptation of the James Jones novel The Thin Red Line. Always concerned about the way natural settings affect human endeavors, Malick shows soldiers who think and act; the film focuses as much on the reveries the jungle inspires in the character Private Witt as on the battle for Guadalcanal. Yet, released in the wake of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Malick's film, with its more nuanced narrative and portrayal of masculinity, was largely ignored, except by critics. More consistent with the prevailing image of military masculinity are the leisure activities of Hawkeye and Trapper John in the film and television versions of M*A*S*H. For all their insight and wit, when they are not engaged in heroic surgery, they often revert to adolescent behavior, veering among subverting authority, swilling home-distilled gin, and either harassing or bedding the nurses. The one cultured character in the program, Major Charles Emerson Winchester, is depicted as a prig.
These images have exerted a powerful influence on our conception of the military, and they have helped establish the conditions in which the humanities are taught at the military academies. Incoming cadets and midshipmen expect their academy education and training to prepare them for military service as junior officers, and they tend to base their evaluation of courses and training on their understanding of what military service requires. If their conception of military service has been shaped by popular media, then they are bound to value that which they believe draws on the qualities of military masculinity. In these conditions, the humanities cannot be expected to fare well.
Humanities Devalued
Exacerbating the situation is the status of the humanities in American culture today. By now, many of us are familiar with the findings of the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Fewer than half of American adults read literature; the steepest decline in reading in the past twenty years—28 percent—occurred among children; and fewer men than women read literature. As literary critic and theorist Robert Scholes asked in a forum at the 2004 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, "Whither, or wither, the humanities?" Several answers to Scholes's question, specifically those of forum participants Louis Menand and Barbara Herrnstein Smith—published by the MLA in Profession 2005—examine the humanities in relation to the sciences, which is not surprising given the consensus among many faculty members in the humanities that the sciences broker the most power and resources in higher education today. But who outside the humanities considers whether this balance might be more precarious than it appears? In his 2005 bestseller The World Is Flat, columnist Thomas Friedman points to the danger of declining student interest in technology and the sciences. He is mum about the importance of the humanities.
One should not be surprised if midshipmen and cadets evince the same perspective. As one Coast Guard cadet asked one of my students, "Why should I study literature if I'm going to build bridges?" But this perspective reflects a weak knowledge of history. The model for the American military academy can be traced back to the second decade of the nineteenth century, when West Point superintendent Sylvanus Thayer envisioned a "seminary academy" founded on character development and engineering education. According to political scientist John P. Lovell, in Neither Athens nor Sparta: The American Service Academies in Transition, published in 1979, West Point was the first engineering college in the United States, and it pioneered engineering education throughout most of the nineteenth century. This is the part of the history that we tend to focus on today—the importance of engineering education at the service academies.
A History Forgotten
Yet it is a myth that those who value the sciences and engineering do not or cannot also value the arts. We need think only of the great Renaissance men who excelled in the belles lettres, the arts, the sciences, and technology. Leonardo DaVinci comes to mind as well as Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and Thomas Jefferson. It is a further myth that military service necessarily precludes appreciation of, let alone participation in, the arts. We would not have a literature of modern war if warriors had not written it. Poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, novelist Erich Maria Remarque, and author and film director Jean Renoir all fought in the First World War. This history, too, should establish the conditions of teaching humanities at the military academies. But for the prevailing image of a circumscribed masculinity, it would.
In addition, the long history of the fine arts at the service academies should be as much a part of the narrative of their educational tradition as engineering is. In the nineteenth century, West Point required all cadets to study drawing. For nearly forty years, their professor was Robert W. Weir, painter of the Embarkation of the Pilgrims, which sits in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and father of the American Impressionist J. Alden Weir. John P. Lovell notes in his book that the Air Force Academy was founded with a department of fine arts. It would seem, then, that the conditions already exist in the deep structures of the academies for graduating officers who have attained a fair balance between the humanities and the sciences.
I would suggest that it is this deep structure that explains why an ROTC officer lamenting his lost copy of Chaucer is not an exception. Cadets and midshipmen are not much like the prevailing cultural images of uniformed personnel; they are far more interesting and multifaceted. They seek the humanities, although they may not describe their actions in those terms. Cadets play in bands, put on plays, sing and dance in musicals, and write poems and short stories. Their majors are no predictors of interest or skill. This past year, the greatest percentage of students enrolled in the Coast Guard Academy's introduction to drawing class were math majors.
Artist-Cadets
In 2003, the academy's engineering department hosted the first art exhibition on campus in recent memory. The show highlighted works created by civil engineering students enrolled in a reinforced concrete class. Their professor, an officer in the final year of a four-year tour, reinvented the standard project of the class. Instead of requiring the cadets to construct a beam, he asked them to construct something that expressed how they would like to change the world. Their works ranged from small to large. One pair of cadets made clasping hands; another made a large bench that rested on two Buddhas, the whole piece weighing at least a quarter ton. One of the most arresting pieces was a tree with rebar (a reinforcing bar for concrete) for trunk and branches. From the rebar hung cement leaves encrusted with colored stones. At the opening of the exhibition, Baroque music played, and the artist-engineers stood by their works. One needed only to show interest in a work, and the creator would talk expansively about its message. I doubt the cadets would have been as enthusiastic about a beam.
A year later, the cadets mounted their first juried art show in the upper lounge of Leamy Hall, which serves as the cadets' student union. The show was the brainchild of a senior majoring in operations research who wanted a venue to show his paintings. He invited his peers to submit their works of art, and the Cadet Art Show was born. Now in its third year, the show highlights paintings and drawings, three-dimensional compositions, and photography. Alumni from the class of 1953 sponsor the show, offering prizes to the best work in each category and a prize for the best work of all three categories.
In my literature courses, I search for ways to expose the cadets to the arts beyond the classroom. Thanks to the generosity of Coast Guard Auxiliarists, this year three cadets studied drawing for a week in Italy at the Florence Academy of Art, learning a technique called the "sight-size method." This method, which involves plumb lines and an emphasis on light and shadow, can be traced to the nineteenth-century French academic artist Gérome, a teacher of both J. Alden Weir and John Singer Sargent. The cadets spent a week drawing a plaster cast, moving through several stages until the dimensions of the cast could be perceived on the two-dimensional page. One of the cadets won first prize in the drawing and painting category at this year's Cadet Art Show.
We bring theater troupes to the academy to perform, sponsor readings by renowned writers, and recently have begun an annual poetry slam to highlight the cadets' poetry. Cadets also take field trips to Boston and New York to visit museums. They have attended operas at the Metropolitan, some of them meeting performers Ben Heppner and René Pape in a rehearsal room while on a backstage tour. West Point cadets have been featured in the New Yorker for attending the Met. This past fall, after I took nearly fifty Coast Guard cadets to see Verdi's Rigoletto at the Met, a junior officer reported that he had overheard an upper-class cadet tell an underclass cadet, "If you're lucky, next year you'll get to go to New York to see an opera."
There will always be students who resist the humanities. I imagine they attend colleges and universities across the country, and humanities faculty no doubt face some of the same challenges I've described wherever they teach. What is amazing about teaching the humanities at a service academy, though, is not overcoming those challenges, but finding every semester the cadets and midshipmen who will not be limited by cultural images, icons, or myths. As midshipman David Parker wrote in my Humanities in World Literature class: "Command is not strictly interested in the business or patterns [of] things, but rather primarily in the business of people and ideas. . . . If my generation grasps one challenge, it's that all scientific progress and technical advances are worthless if we can't get along with our neighbor down the street, let alone another nation or culture." The wonder is not that we produce students like David, who can see the need to balance one kind of learning with another, but that we do not recognize the same yearning in all of them.
Lucretia A. Flammang is captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and professor of English at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, where she is also head of the humanities department. She coordinates cadet arts education with the Lyme Academy of Art and the Florence Academy of Art. She has published and presented on topics including arts education, gender diversity in the service academies, and the work of Victorian social reformer Josephine Butler, who was the primary focus of her doctoral research. Her e-mail address is Lucretia.A.Flammang@uscga.edu.
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