Douglas Higbee, ed. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010; 195 pp; ISBN: 978-1-40940-757-7, cloth $99.95 USD.
It seems fitting to review an edited collection for the CAUT Bulletin written by professors who work within the universe of military academies and staff colleges given the recently released Report of the Commission on Governance of the Royal Military College of Canada, commissioned by CAUT and independently authored by Elinor Sloan, Robin Broadway and retired lieutenant colonel Steve Nash. Indeed, there are threads of concern and continuity in both.
Full disclosure: I work in Canada’s only staff college for mid-career and senior officers, the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, a post-graduate institution whose professors (in the department of defence studies) are hired and promoted through the Royal Military College. When it comes to the authors of this collection, I know intimately and personally of what they speak.
It’s probably fair to say that although most Canadian professors will have heard of the Royal Military College, only an infinitesimally small number have engaged with the Canadian Forces College or are aware of what we do, although that has changed somewhat since academic expansion in 2006–2009. I am also an active member of the Canadian Military Colleges Faculty Association executive.
The authors in this collection (except Huw Osborne at the Royal Military College) work at the many military academies and professional military colleges in the United States. In Canada we have only the Royal Military College and Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean as cadet institutions, and the Canadian Forces College for professional development of military officers. Although there are many points of departure between those who work in American academies, many of the teaching and learning challenges and rewards are similar.
Douglas Higbee’s introduction nicely frames a number of the debates addressed by the contributors: the healthy tension between military and civilian society in a democracy; cultural differences and polarities between “civilian” and “military” academics working within the world of cadet and professional military education; and the existence of inherent diversities which belie such binary constructions.
The first third of the collection is written by academics at the intersections of military education and military service; the second by those who teach broadly in the humanities in military academies; and finally those, like me, who teach in professional military colleges, which are also post-graduate institutions. The collection is both colloquial and personal. Indeed the career trajectories of the authors enhance the credibility of their conclusions.
This collection is a useful introduction to the world of cadet and professional military education, and many of its authors deliberately set out to deconstruct stereotypes they have encountered or perhaps once had themselves. In “Rethinking the Culture Wars at the Naval Academy,” Jeffrey A. Sychertz finds to his own initial surprise that the “broad institutional stereotypes of the liberal college student and the conservative cadet” are plain wrong. (p. 81)
His students at the naval academy were more supportive of the need to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” as unfair and prejudicial than his civilian students at Fayetteville State University in Illinois, many of whom were conservative Christians. His midshipmen argued that the prohibition on sexual harassment should be independent of gender or sexual orientation: no one should be “…using their sexuality to create a hostile or offensive workplace.” (p. 83) Rather, what struck Sychertz is the idealism and public service orientation of his students. They think beyond economic rationale as a measure of humanity or success.
Indeed, Sychertz reported that in a 2006 conference conversation with two “self-confessed Marxists” they had wondered where “…all the young Marxists and socialists were today, when one said, ‘They are all over in Iraq’.” (p. 87) Thus it has ever been: many socialist and communist Americans left home and safety to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, and many of those same young men went on to fight fascism in Europe and Asia. Many of the 1960s radicals came to their opposition to the Vietnam War while actually fighting in it.
Many of the authors speak of the institutional requirement to be relevant to core values and mission. Curriculum is not freely deve-loped, but must be designed and delivered to serve broad military and national interests. This does not mean, however, that the social sciences and humanities are necessarily denigrated over engineering or hard sciences. But as Andrea Trocha-Van Nort notes in her chapter, “Literature, Identity and Officership,” the student’s “hopes, needs, and perspectives” must be taken into account, as well as the “realistic choices with which they will be confronted in the future.” (p. 93)
In my view, this is also just good teaching. In teaching literature, this does not simply mean a focus on martial texts, for example she uses Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to explore “…integrity, service, and excellence while also probing reason, moral courage, motivational rhetoric, and successful decision-making.” Hamlet becomes a study on revenge where there are no clearly delineated lines of “right” and “wrong”— hence the title character’s prevarication.
Many of the authors do not shy away from criticism, and present a nuanced and complicated view of their experiences. Edward F. Palm fairly presents the case against military academies, while arguing in favor of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs in such liberal bastions as Berkeley. Carol Burke, a self-described “combat ethnographer,” defends the US Army’s controversial Human Terrain System which enlists academics, largely anthropologists, to deploy their cultural expertise on the ground as part of counterinsurgency operations, while concretely suggesting how using academics as part of the “hearts and minds” campaigns necessitated by asymmetric warfare might well be improved.
The collection is not entirely positive in outlook. Daniel J. Hughes’ chapter, “Professors in the Colonels’ World,” is both depressing and disparaging. Hughes addresses issues facing academics teaching at the Air War College headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and in particular highlights the tension between colonel-professors and their civilian counterparts. His criticism is sharp: he notes a process of “selective in-breeding” in the US, where retired colonels obtain favored treatment in obtaining doctoral degrees from select institutions, where both breadth and depth are sacrificed on the altar of necessary credentialism. (p. 151)
He rails against an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, where the colonels and their students share an “addiction to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.” (p. 153) According to Hughes, the environment is exceedingly paternalistic, conservatively biased in “almost every area of public and foreign policy,” (p. 162) and overtly and evangelically religious. The students are regarded as “too important to fail” (p. 154) given significant tax-payer investment, so low grades are exceedingly rare. There is no organization representing faculty, they have no role in shaping curriculum, are encouraged to develop instant “expertise” and teach standardized courses that “rarely rise to the level of real graduate education.” (p. 155)
Research is at least structurally discouraged, given required office face-time, a barrage of constant interruptions, and “amusing and … ignorant bosses” who unfortunately “… do not know the difference between a vanity press and a respected university press.” Although the professors have more academic freedom than might be expected, and the Air University “… subscribes to the principle of academic freedom along the lines established by the American Association of University Professors,” (p. 161) publications must still undergo a public affairs and security review.
Why would young academics thus choose to work there? An oversupplied academic market is one reason. But Hughes also correctly points to good pay and benefits, a focus on national security, and the availability of funds for research and professional development. The price to pay is mobility. Hughes states in the last two decades at Maxwell, only one civilian successfully returned to the regular academic world. (p. 165)
Bradley L. Carter’s chapter “No ‘Holidays from History’: Adult Learning, Professional Military Education and Teaching History” details a supposedly progressive adult learner model premised on formalized orientation that, while promoting collegiality, in reality is more about standardization and indoctrination than imparting the Socratic method. Yet he is much kinder in his analysis overall.
While noting the tension in a “pragmatic approach to (military) history” (p. 173) that views the past as usefully mined for contemporary lessons, he effusively commends the students — bright, motivated, thoughtful (and decidedly not “trigger-happy knuckle-draggers”) — that are capable of much more than historical determinism and appreciate content and context. He is impressed by their candour and breadth of opinion. (p. 175)
Given the dearth of Canadian content other than Osborne’s provocative and compelling chapter on homosociality at the Royal Military College, one might reasonably ask how the Canadian system compares, especially in the light of the recent CAUT-commissioned report, which highlights the problematic nature of our “tenure-track” hiring process, recommends more collaborative decision-making, academic representation on governance bodies, more budgetary authority to the Principal, the incorporation of the promotion process — now clearly broken — into the collective agreement, as well as significant improvements to a number of organizational, procedural and administrative matters.
The current government has said little more than they will study the report.
Thanks to a well-entrenched faculty association and a history of relatively enlightened leadership, professors at all three Canadian institutions (Royal Military College, Collège militaire royal Saint-Jean, and Canadian Forces College) are guaranteed academic freedom, structurally and individually encouraged to pursue research through a historic policy that assesses faculty on a yearly basis (and historically for promotion) on the criteria of research, teaching and service. One finds an incredible range of views — political and otherwise — among both faculty and students in a secular workplace environment, a rich tradition of interdisciplinarity, as well as strong connections to civilian academic associations, presses and conferences.
At the Canadian Forces College we have failed students, rigorously enforce standards of academic integrity and, in my experience, have less pressure to grade-inflate than in civilian universities. If there is a built-in bias among the mid-career and senior officers I deal with, it pertains less to politics than to a bleak view of human nature — well-earned given two decades of post-Cold War deployments to the nastiest conflict zones of the planet (think Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, the DRC, Sudan, Afghanistan…). My students have seen up close and personal the darker side of what humanity is capable of, and by and large they sincerely seek to find the complex reasons why such conflicts occur, are sustained, and the legacies they engender.
They are committed to public service and all that Canada stands for at home and abroad in a way most of us are not. After all, they signed up for the ultimate sacrifice.
Nevertheless, in Canada as in the US, the picture is not entirely rosy. Despite robust wording on academic freedom, the tenure and promotion process is not built into the Royal Military College collective agreement, and has led to a series of grievances and considerable insecurity. We have not had a call for promotions in two years. The American employment situation is often more precarious.
I know of no military academies or schools in the US that have faculty associations which collectively bargain with their employers over salary grids, let alone policies such as academic freedom, tenure, promotion and working conditions. American faculty constantly reapply for their own positions due to term employment. Term employment is increasingly the norm for the “reserve army” of academic labour on both sides of the border, in both civilian universities and military colleges.
Despite this well-integrated, organized, and diverse collection one sadly suspects this volume has a built-in limited readership — the authors are effectively preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, this text is essential reading for those in the chain of command (in both Canada and the US) who remain less than supportive of broad-based education in both military academies and civilian universities as opposed to technical education or training, as well as their political overlords who approve funding for such programs. The critical and analytical skills — not to mention how easily content is applied to questions of leadership, ethics and crisis decision-making — are argument enough about the operational relevance of their absolute necessity in a robust democracy.
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Barbara Falk is associate professor in the department of defence studies at Canadian Forces College and Royal Military College of Canada.