Academy Task Force Report
The long awaited Task Force Report (The Report) has finally arrived, and it is big in two respects. It is big in size, and it is a big disappointment. It does not plow any new ground. It does not tell us anything that we did not already know. Unless you have been on the moon for the last 40 years, there is nothing new in the report. Experience is the best teacher, and history is a reliable guide. The reality of seeing the world through lenses formed by dated experiences is not a handicap. It is called tradition. It keeps you on course and prevents reinventing the wheel every generation. However, between the jibber-jabber there was some great analysis and a few factual and historical inaccuracies. But, overall the Report is a commendable snapshot of the Coast Guard Academy culture.
https://www.uscg.mil/foia/taskforce/Appendix.Release.pdf
Maybe the Task Force Report was just a diversion, a means to buy some time until the furor over the Webster Smith case subsided.
It is an old Washington, DC trick. If you want to table a matter or if you want to buy some time, then you form a Commission or a Study Group. That will buy you some time and it will give the various factions time to cool off. This Task Force took about six months and that was enough. Not many people except for certain elements of the news media are as emotionally wrought over the Webster Smith case today as they were six months ago. So, in that respect, the Task Force was a success.
It is not new or surprising that cadets do not trust Company Officers. That is old news. Before the female cadets came, the Company Officers were not fully trusted, but they were revered. They were respected and they had a close working relationship with the Cadet Company Officers. We even had dinner at their homes on occasion. That chemistry changed when the female cadets arrived. If there was only a little trust before the Webster Smith Case, it is no wonder that even that pecuniary amount has been severely eroded after the cadets witnessed how vulnerable they were if they stepped forward and became involved. Cadets went to school on the Webster Smith case and its aftermath. They saw exactly how the system worked. They saw the most senior officers exhibiting character traits that were far outside of the Honor Code. They learned what kind of reprehensible behavior was allowed and was geared to help you survive when the chips are down.
Doubt, distrust, and disillusionment were introduced into the barracks. Social anthropologists should not have been surprised. Before Captain Cook arrived in the South Pacific, the Tahitians had no concept of personal property or immorality. Captain Cook introduced the concept of personal ownership and the Anglican sense of sexual immorality. The Tahitians, who for two thousand years had owned everything communally, thrived and dance nude, began to covet the possessions of others. They put on clothes to cover their nakedness and became drunken and sexually promiscuous. The alcohol, the clothes, sense of personal ownership, the feeling of sinning and Western diseases wiped out thousands of Tahitians.
Introducing a new element always means some change in the chemistry. Just the rumor in the 60’s that Black cadets were coming started the ripples in the Corps of Cadets in the Class of 1966. When Ned Lofton, Mike Grace, Ron Blendu, and Imonse Leskinovich, among others, mostly cadets from Massachusetts and Florida, heard that Kenny Boyd and London Steverson were going to break the color barrier in the Class of 1968, they immediately let it be known that they intended to institute their “plantation policy”. Merle Smith stepped up and said, “Not over my dead body”.
It was common practice in those days for upperclass cadets to make slaves of swabs, incoming freshmen.The swab would be required to come to the upperclassman’s room every morning, empty the waste basket, sweep the floor, make the bed, do the laundry, and anything else the upperclassman desired. (See, COMMAND and LEADERSHIP, NOT ALWAYS the SAME, by Ray Coye, PhD, CGA Class 1971, CGA Alumni Bulletin, Vol69, No.4, p. 10) It is similar to the practice in prison where a convict adopts a younger, weaker, more effeminate convict as his personal “cup cake”. The slave practice continued through the 70’s, 80’s, and maybe even until today. An upperclassman could require a swab to do anything he pleased, depending on his proclivities. There were no female cadets in the barracks in those days. Today, there are women in Chase Hall. One can only wonder what they are required to do today to escape hazing and punishment.
Introducing women into the cadet corps had a profound affect on the cadet psyche. Sexual attraction, petty rivalries, competition for favors, urges to impress, ambitiousness cut across class lines. Loyalties shifted. They shifted from cadet loyalty upwards to the Company officers. The new loyalties were lateral to fellow cadets, and the Company Officers went from friends to enemies. That is what you have today.
The 23 or so incidents of sexual involvement that the Task Force looked at were the same ones that the Webster Smith Civil Rights Investigator looked at, but she only acknowledged 11. That appears to be a low number and that may be cause for elation in some quarters, but it all depends on how you define the parameters.
It is as President Bill Clinton would say; “It all depends on your definition of a sexual incident”. The Task Force and the Civil Rights investigator only looked at the most extreme cases. So, there were only 11 to 23 that were so egregious that they had to be dealt with by the Administration. They did not even consider the many that only involved public displays of affection, hand holding, caressing, touching body parts, and feeling each other up; not to mention, the untold numerous cases of consensual sex between cadets who fancied themselves as being in love. Those were not considered. And there were the many incidents that were not reported and are known only to the cadets. They did not report them because they could not trust the Company Officers, and they did not want to be known as a snitch. And those were legion.
So, you can predetermine your outcome by the way you define your parameters. I know, the cadets know, and most of the Administration suspects that there are many more incidents that they would just as soon leave in the closet. The cadets have learned that their security lies in their obscurity.
In a student body of only about 950, with 30 per cent being females, if 73 percent of the cadets occasionally engage in sexual relations with “other cadets in Chase Hall” there would logically have to be more than 11 to 23 incidents of sexual misconduct, since the Regulations forbid all sex between cadets in Chase Hall. If 79 percent of the cadets believe in binge drinking and over half do not believe looking at pornography disrupts good order and discipline, then Chase Hall is a hot bed of sexual activity. There is more anatomy being studied than seamanship in Chase Hall. I dare say that there is more torrid sex taking place in Chase Hall than in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. (The Report, page 24, Step One Analysis).
Even assuming the Report is correct that sexual assaults are at about 5 percent, in a population of 950, that would indicate 48 assaults. (The Report, page 40) If we included the consensual sexual activity, then 11 to 23 incidents of sexual misconduct in Chase Hall is highly doubtful. And out of all that committed sex, only Webster Smith was consider worthy of a General Court-martial.
“Women generally outperform their male counterparts in both academic and military requirements”, according to the Report. (The Report, page 39). If that is truly the case, then it is a good thing the Academy is not a regular “Joe College”. The percentage of women in the student body could easily go from 30 percent to 70 or 80 percent on a strictly merit system of admissions. Men would have to seek “affirmative action” in order to gain admission. The Admissions Office would have to consider GENDER as a factor in admissions, along with race, SAT scores, and extra-curricular activities. It would be the Whole-man Concept, or perhaps the Whole-person Concept.
One out of three cadets graduating in the Class of 2007 from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy will be a woman, making it the largest class of female cadets to graduate.
President George W. Bush is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech to the 229 graduates.
The Task Force Report is factually and historically incorrect on several points. Cadet Merle Smith’s appointment was not a result of President John F. Kennedy’s observations that there were no Black cadets marching in the Coast Guard Academy contingent in his 1961 inaugural parade. It would take months for Kennedy’s observation to be relayed through the chain of command all the way to the Academy Admissions Office. Then the word would have to filter down to the Recruiting Offices. Moreover, Merle Smith would have had to take the SAT exam and complete the application for admission before the Academy even marched in the Kennedy inaugural parade. Merle Smith was a service brat. His father was a career military officer. His family moved around consistently. His father being an army colonel wanted his son to get a free military academy education, but he could not get a Congressional appointment. The Coast Guard Academy is the only service academy that does not require a Congressional appointment. So, Colonel Smith applied to the Coast Guard Academy for his son. In 1962 when Merle Smith arrived at the Academy, it was not as a Black cadet. He had competed and gained admission without any regard to his possible ethnic background. He was not recruited as a Black cadet. He was not admitted as a Black cadet. It was not until 1964 two years later when Kenny Boyd and London Steverson were admitted in the Class of 1968, that it was discovered that Merle Smith was of African American background. There have never been more than two Kennedy Cadets. They are Boyd and Steverson.
Cadet Anthony Alejandro would hardly consider himself Hispanic. He was an Argentine from an aristocratic family. They considered themselves Italian. They disdain Spaniards, especially Mexicans. They say that they are the only Europeans in South America.
The Report makes no mention of Cadet Donnie Winchester. He was a favorite of Otto Graham. He was in the Class of 1966.He was the first American Indian of almost pure blood to graduate from the Academy. Perhaps Indians are so rich now with their casinos and the rich mineral deposits on the Reservation lands, they are no longer considered a minority group. The Census Bureau probably still classifies them as a minority group.
Jarvis L. Wright may be another case of “racial kidnapping”. From 1876 to 1961 there had never been a Black graduate from the Coast Guard Academy.
Wikipedia allowed someone in the Coast Guard to insert a reference to Jarvis Wright into an article concerning Black Cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. The Coast Guard must be extremely desperate to even attempt such a ploy as to try to move the time line for the first appointment tendered to a Black cadet back from 1962 to 1955, from Merle Smith to Jarvis Wright.
All history is spin, but this is revisionist history at its worst. Jarvis Wright is the original “invisible man”. Only a young naive person would even conceive of such a ridiculous thought. Anyone over 50 years old would know immediately that this is a most unlikely scenario. In 1954 the Nation was undergoing a revolution. The Supreme Court was about to announce a “unanimous” Decision concerning racial segregation in the case of Brown v Board of Education. Everyone was riveted to their television screens watching the race riots in Little Rock, Arkansas. Not since the Civil War had the Southern states so openly defied the Federal Government. Racial integration was on everyone’s minds. President Eisenhower was forced to choose between sending in Federal Troops or nationalizing the Arkansas National Guard to force Governor Orville Faubuss to allow Black students to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock. He ended up using the Screaming Eagles from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
It is unthinkable that Coast Guard senior officers who were born and raised in the Deep South were secretly trying to recruit a Black; the first Black cadet in the history of the Academy. What idiot would even dream of such a nightmare? The thought is not even conceivable. Even the thought or the recommendation to do such a thing would have ruined any white officer’s career in the Coast Guard.
Jarvis Wright is the original “invisible man”. Where is the evidence that Jarvis Wright ever existed? What state did he come from? What high school did he graduate from? Where is the proof? There is none.
In the 50s and the 60s it was mandatory that a Black high school student applying to a white college was required to submit a photo with the application. They wanted to make sure that you were black, but not too black. This was one of the institutionalized segregationist racist practices that were abolished after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I had to submit a photo with my application to the Coast Guard Academy in 1962 and 1963. If Jarvis Wright ever existed, then the Coast Guard Academy and the Commandant Office of Personnel would have his application and a photo as evidence. Some one should publish it.
Moreover, I worked in Coast Guard Headquarters in the Office of Personnel for seven years from 1972 to 1979, and no one ever mention anyone by the name of Jarvis Wright. I was the personification and the embodiment of Minority Recruiting for the Coast Guard. Except for Lcdr Maxie M. Berry in the Civil rights Office and Earl Brown in the Office of Engineering, the only two other Black officers at Headquarters were assigned to my staff. They were Earl Martin and Walter Sapp. They worked for me. In no meetings or discussions, either formal or informal, did the name of Jarvis Wright ever come up.
This is just another reason the Coast Guard cannot be trusted to write history. Their motives are suspect. Anyone who would "take a bow" for recruiting white women as a minority deserves to be subjected to the strictest scrutiny before accepting such unbelievable claims more than 50 years after the fact. Could this be another case of Racial Kidnapping, as in the case of Michael Healy? The Coast Guard has been known to do this sort of this before. As President Reagan said “We must trust BUT verify”. Where is the proof? Show us a picture of Jarvis Wright? Or is he truly the invisible man?
It is highly questionable whether Jarvis Wright was recruited as an African American or was of a minority ethnic group, even if he ever existed, any more than Captain Michael Healy. He was a white Irish catholic who has been heralded by the Coast Guard as the “Black Hero of the North”, and as the first Black Captain in Coast Guard history. Mike Healy was not Black. He was a white, hard drinking Irishman.
So, it is highly unlikely that from President Kennedy’s remarks in 1961 to 1962, the Coast Guard looked for, found, and persuaded to apply for admission to the Academy a Black high school student. The facts and the timeline speak for themselves. You are entitled to your own opinion, BUT you are not entitled to your own FACTS.
Any student or writer of contemporary history has a duty to disclose his or her subjective values. This obligation is all the more imperative for an African American writing about the times and the events in which he lived. One must always seek to maintain critical distance from the subject. However, cold detachment is not required to be factually correct and objective. Twenty years after my Coast Guard career ended, have given me sufficient distance to reflect soberly upon a subject that I find infinitely fascinating. That is to say, why did it take so long to allow African Americans to serve in the Coast Guard officer corps. Also, since I found it so easy to recruit Black male high school graduates to the Academy, why was I run out of that job after I had demonstrated that it could be done.
All history is spin. The history of the first Black cadets to enter the Coast Guard Academy is too complex and too serious to be left primarily to Coast Guard Public Information Officers whose first impulse is to make the Coast Guard look good and honorable. They would readily sacrifice truth and accuracy to do that. The exclusion of African Americans from the Academy from 1876 until 1962 is a tragic fact of American history. My memory and interpretation of this history would be even more serious flawed than it undoubted is, were it not for the official records that I kept of every significant event that occurred in my life as a Coast Guard officer. My perspective my be subject to debate, but my facts are irrefutable.
The segregation of Black enlisted men in the ranks and the exclusion of Blacks from the officer training programs were legally sanctioned by the Doctrine of Plessey v Ferguson and its Jim Crow laws that this Nation accepted until the late 1960s. I was born and raised within that system. For the first 17 years of my life I existed on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
Were it not for President John F Kennedy, my class and status would have never afforded me an opportunity to attend the Coast Guard Academy, a previously all white institution. Try as I might to escape the psychological baggage of my early years of living in apartheid, this Blog tends to reflect the imprint of my early childhood in the segregated South. My recitation of what I view as facts my draw the ire of the casual white reader and bring forth accusations of lack of neutrality and bias.
My experience in the Coast Guard from 1968 to 1988, and the court-martial of Cadet Webster Smith helped me to understand why Black parents were so reluctant to hand over their sons to Coast Guard recruiters before I became the Chief of Minority Recruiting in 1972.
It appears that President George Bush has been invited to be the Graduation Speaker for the Class of 2007. Well, Mr. President in your remarks I urge you to grant a Presidential Pardon to Cadet Webster Smith. He has more in common with you than most of the other Cadets. He is a Texan, just as you. And, he has been railroaded. Even Pontius Pilate pardoned one convicted felon a year for the Jews. You have much more good old Christian charity in your heart than Pontius Pilate ever had. So, Mr. President unless you intend to grant a Presidential Pardon to Webster Smith, I urge you to walk away from this speaking invitation. Just walk away.
Just walk away.
Judge London Steverson
London Eugene Livingston Steverson (born March 13, 1947) was one of the first two African Americans to graduate from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1968. Later, as chief of the newly formed Minority Recruiting Section of the United States Coast Guard (USCG), he was charged with desegregating the Coast Guard Academy by recruiting minority candidates. He retired from the Coast Guard in 1988 and in 1990 was appointed to the bench as a Federal Administrative Law Judge with the Office of Hearings and Appeals, Social Security Administration.
Early Life and Education
Steverson was born and raised in Millington, Tennessee, the oldest of three children of Jerome and Ruby Steverson. At the age of 5 he was enrolled in the E. A. Harrold elementary school in a segregated school system. He later attended the all black Woodstock High School in Memphis, Tennessee, graduating valedictorian.
A Presidential Executive Order issued by President Truman had desegregated the armed forces in 1948,[1] but the service academies were lagging in officer recruiting. President Kennedy specifically challenged the United States Coast Guard Academy to tender appointments to Black high school students. London Steverson was one of the Black student to be offered such an appointment, and when he accepted the opportunity to be part of the class of 1968, he became the second African American to enter the previously all-white military academy. On June 4, 1968 Steverson graduated from the Coast Guard Academy with a BS degree in Engineering and a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard.
In 1974, while still a member of the Coast Guard, Steverson entered The National Law Center of The George Washington University and graduated in 1977 with a Juris Doctor of Laws Degree.
USCG Assignments.
Steverson's first duty assignment out of the Academy was in Antarctic research logistical support. In July 1968 he reported aboard the Coast Guard Cutter (CGC) Glacier [2] (WAGB-4), an icebreaker operating under the control of the U.S. Navy, and served as a deck watch officer and head of the Marine Science Department. He traveled to Antarctica during two patrols from July 1968 to August 1969, supporting the research operations of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Research Project in and around McMurdo Station. During the 1969 patrol the CGC Glacier responded to an international distress call from the Argentine icebreaker General SanMartin, which they freed.
He received another military assignment from 1970 to 1972 in Juneau, Alaska as a Search and Rescue Officer. Before being certified as an Operations Duty Officer, it was necessary to become thoroughly familiar with the geography and topography of the Alaskan remote sites. Along with his office mate, Ltjg Herbert Claiborne "Bertie" Pell, the son of Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, Steverson was sent on a familiarization tour of Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force bases. The bases visited were Base Kodiak, Base Adak Island, and Attu Island, in the Aleutian Islands.[3]
Steverson was the Duty Officer on September 4, 1971 when an emergency call was received that an Alaska Airlines Boeing 727 airline passenger plane was overdue at Juneau airport. This was a Saturday and the weather was foggy with drizzling rain. Visibility was less than one-quarter mile. The 727 was en route to Seattle, Washington from Anchorage, Alaska with a scheduled stop in Juneau. There were 109 people on board and there were no survivors. Steverson received the initial alert message and began the coordination of the search and rescue effort. In a matter of hours the wreckage from the plane, with no survivors, was located on the side of a mountain about five miles from the airport. For several weeks the body parts were collected and reassembled in a staging area in the National Guard Armory only a few blocks from the Search and Rescue Center where Steverson first received the distress broadcast.[4]. Later a full investigation with the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the cause of the accident was equipment failure.[5]
Another noteworthy item is Steverson's involvement as an Operations Officer during the seizure of two Russian fishing vessels, the Kolevan and the Lamut for violating an international agreement prohibiting foreign vessels from fishing in United States territorial waters. The initial attempts at seizing the Russian vessels almost precipitated an international incident when the Russian vessels refused to proceed to a U. S. port, and instead sailed toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. Russian MIG fighter planes were scrambled, as well as American fighter planes from Elmendorf Air Force Base before the Russian vessels changed course and steamed back
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Labels: Chase Hall Study.
posted by ichbinalj at 4:41 PM
13 Comments:
Judge Steverson,
You might not be correct in your assertion about President Kennedy...
See INTEGRATION OF THE ARMED FORCES
1940-1965 by Morris J. MacGregor, Jr. and published by the CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY, UNITED STATES ARMY in 1985.
http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/integration/IAF-20.htm
"The disquietude White House staff members produced among Defense Department officials was nothing compared to the trauma induced by the President's personal attention. John Kennedy rarely intervened but he did so on occasion quickly and decisively and in a way illustrative of his administration's civil rights style. He acted promptly, for example, when he noticed an all-white unit from the Coast Guard Academy marching in his inaugural parade. His call to the Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon on inauguration night led to the admission of the first black students to the Coast Guard Academy. He elaborated on the incident during his first cabinet meeting, asking each department head to analyze the minority employment situation in his own department."
Thank you, Peter. You are as eloquent as you are resourceful. I have read the document. It is quoted extensively in one of my earlier Blog postings. However, having been a part of the Coast Guard recruiting organization for about 4 years, I am intimately familiar with how it works. I know how long it takes for orders from the top of the chain of command to be implimented in the field. We had to literally beat the bushes day and night in order to find qualified minority candidates.
Unless the Coast Guard has destroyed the original records, they could clear this matter up quickly. All they have to do is release the Admission's records.
March 31 2007
By John christoffersen.
NEW LONDON -- The U.S. Coast Guard Academy has lost its way, struggling with a climate of distrust and cynicism in which nearly one in four cadets say that they would not report classmates who commit sexual assault, a task force reported Friday.
The task force, created last year after the first student court-martial in the academy's 130-year history, said that the academy must restore its focus on leadership and character development to create the best officers to safeguard the nation's coast.
Otherwise, the report warned, the academy is in danger of losing the distinct identity that separates it from other colleges.
"The task force concluded that the academy lost its focus on the reason it exists, and what makes it different from other colleges. Officership," the report states. "Officership is that unique blend of skill, expertise, and personal integrity required of a Coast Guard officer as a military professional - as a leader of character, servant of the nation, defender of the Constitution and exemplar of its ideals."
The task force, which released its report with an annual survey of cadets, began its work last fall after Cadet Webster Smith was acquitted of rape in June but served five months in prison for extorting a female classmate for sexual favors. The study, designed to determine whether the academy was meeting the needs of a changing Coast Guard, did not find widespread problems feared in the wake of Smith's case.
"The task force made an exhaustive effort to uncover whatever misconduct or malfeasance may have represented the potential unseen iceberg below the recently reported events," the report says. "What it found was a dearth of this behavior, and precious little that had not been duly investigated and adjudicated."
But the task force said that an emphasis on sports and academics has overshadowed leadership development and a focus on core values. Many cadets accept underage drinking, pornography and sex among cadets on campus, where it is banned, the report said.
Most cadets do not trust or respect their company officers. Nearly 23 percent of cadets said that they would not report other cadets who commit sexual assault, while 65 percent said that they would allow personal loyalty to affect their decision to report sexual assault, the survey found.
"Cadets' expressed feelings of cynicism and distrust of the academy institution represent a serious obstacle in achieving the academy's mission," the report said.
With about 950 cadets, the school is the smallest U.S. service academy. Women represent about 30 percent of cadets, compared with less than 20 percent at the Air Force and Naval academies and about 15 percent at West Point.
In the 60's Coast Guard Academy company officers were called Tact Officers. I think it was short for Tactical Officers, but they were very professional. We thought that they were almost gods. Every one wanted to be just like them. They were our idols and the model of a perfect officer. We could hardly believe that at the end of our cadet training we would be a close approximation of them. We trusted them implicidly. Even today, their names give me goose pimples: Beef Caldwell, Joe Sipes, Fred Kelly, Joe Finelli, Greg Pennington, Dave Worth, Duke Wellington, Ikens, Tuneski, Sproat, and Flanagan. Even our professors were greatly admired and trusted; Paul Foye, Ellis Perry, Ted Leland, Bob DeMichiell, Rivard, McKew, Haas Sandell, Anderson, Ira Jacobson, Yanaway, Kollmeyer, Ian Cruickshank, and others. They were all white males and they did a great job. We trusted them more than we did the other cadets, that's for sure. These were men of integrity. They led us through the wilderness and into the promised land. What has happened to erode that trust and respect, I have no idea; but, the cadets lost the best friend they ever had outside of mom and dad.
THE FLAT HAT. The Student Newspaper of the College of William and Mary since 1911
6 April 2007 | By Carl Siegmund, Flat Hat Assoc. News Editor |
Academy students claim they would not report assault by fellow cadets.
According to a task force report released last week, nearly 25 percent of cadets at the United States Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut said that they would not report a fellow classmate who committed sexual assault.
Created last year after cadet Webster Smith was tried for rape and later acquitted, the task force recommended that the Coast Guard refocus on building leadership and character.
“The academy lost its focus on the reason it exists, and what makes it different from other colleges: officership,” the task force said in a New York Times article. “Officership is that unique blend of skill, expertise and personal integrity required of a Coast Guard officer as a military professional — as a leader of character, servant of the nation, defender of the Constitution and exemplar of its ideals.”
In the survey conducted by the task force, 13 of the nearly 1,000 cadets claimed they were victims of sexual assault or attempted rape in the last year, with nine women and four men reporting. Nearly one quarter, or 23 percent, of the cadets said they would never report other cadets who committed sexual assault. Sixty-five percent said they would allow personal loyalty to affect their decision to report sexual assault, the Times reported.
While the task force pointed out positive things such as a strong academic atmosphere, athletic success and the strong record of cadets after graduation, it said these points ignored problems concerning leadership and cadets’ continued irresponsible behavior.
Most cadets also did not trust or respect their company officers, the article said, and they expressed cynicism about the Coast Guard, hurting the academy mission.
In response to the survey, the task force also recommended creating a cadet development program to help build character.
Thursday Apr 12, 2007
By Patricia Kime , Navy Times.
The Coast Guard Academy has lost sight of its purpose as it focuses on academic credentialing and its collegiate sports program, a 13-member task force studying the school has concluded.
The Task Force [has] found a collegiate university experience that has eroded its connection to the very things that the Coast Guard holds dear .. its uniqueness as a military service and a law enforcement agency as well as membership in the national intelligence community,” members wrote in a comprehensive study of the 130-year-old school.
The report cited students’ attitudes toward issues such as pornography, sex in the barracks and underage drinking as examples in which cadet behavior is incongruent with Coast Guard core values. In a schoolwide climate survey, 55 percent of cadets who responded — more than 80 percent of the nearly 1,000 students — said they don’t think viewing pornography is a disruption to good order and discipline; 73 percent said cadets “at least occasionally engage in sexual relations at Chase Hall,” while 34 percent said they don’t believe that underage drinking undercuts military order.
All these activities are prohibited on academy grounds.
Those familiar with the academy’s history say they are not surprised by the findings, which were released nearly 10 years to the day after then-commandant of cadets Capt. Bruce Stubbs was fired by the school’s superintendent for a number of reasons, including his attempts to improve military order and discipline at the school.
Then-superintendent Rear Adm. Paul Versaw said he dismissed Stubbs because he wasn’t a “team player.” But insiders say Stubbs and Versaw didn’t see eye to eye on Stubbs’ role as commandant and his efforts to instill a sense of military service in the student body.
Stubbs’ work was cited by the task force, but he declined to comment on its findings. Those familiar with his case and the academy say they see how leadership doctrine might get shortchanged in today’s collegiate environment.
The panel was formed following the court-martial of 1st Class Cadet Webster Smith on rape, extortion and sodomy charges. Smith, who is black, served five months in prison and has filed a discrimination complaint against the school and academy officials, saying he was charged for the same kinds of offenses that garnered administrative punishment for white students. The school has had other high-profile discipline problems in the past year, including a cheating scandal and the dismissal of three cadets for alcohol-related infractions.
Wikipedia allowed someone in the Coast Guard to insert a reference to Jarvis Wright into an article concerning Black Cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. The Coast Guard must be extremely desperate to even attempt such a ploy as to try to move the time line for the first appointment tendered to a Black cadet back from 1962 to 1955, from Merle Smith to Jarvis Wright.
All history is spin, but this is revisionist history at its worst. Jarvis Wright is the original “invisible man”. Only a young naive person would even conceive of such a ridiculous thought. Anyone over 50 years old would know immediately that this is a most unlikely scenario. In 1954 the Nation was undergoing a revolution. The Supreme Court was about to announce a “unanimous” Decision concerning racial segregation. Everyone was riveted to their television screens watching the race riots in Little Rock, Arkansas. Not since the Civil War had the Southern states so openly defied the Federal Government. Racial integration was on everyone’s minds. President Eisenhower was forced to choose between sending in Federal Troops or nationalizing the Arkansas National Guard to force Governor Orville Faubuss to allow Black students to enroll at Central High School in Little Rock. It is unthinkable that Coast Guard senior officers who were born and raised in the Deep South were secretly trying to recruit a Black; the first Black cadet in the history of the Academy. What idiot would even dream of such a night mare? The thought is not even conceivable. Even the thought or the recommendation to do such a thing would have ruined any white officer’s career in the Coast Guard.
Jarvis Wright is the original “invisible man”. Where is the evidence that Jarvis Wright ever existed? What state did he come from? What high school did he graduate from? Where is the proof? There is none.
In the 50s and the 60s it was mandatory when a Black high school student applied to a white college that a photo be submitted with the application. They wanted to make sure that you were black, but not too black. This was one of the institutionalized segregationist practices that were abolished after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. I had to submit a photo with my application to the Coast Guard Academy in 1962 and 1963. If Jarvis Wright ever existed, then the Coast Guard Academy and the Commandant Office of Personnel would have his application and a photo as evidence. Some one should publish it.
Moreover, I worked in Coast Guard Headquarters in the Office of Personnel for 7 years from 1972 to 1979, and no one ever mention anyone by the name of Jarvis Wright. I was the personification and the embodiment of Minority Recruiting for the Coast Guard. Except for Lcdr Maxie M. Berry in the Civil rights Office and Earl Brown in the Engineering Office, the only two other Black officers at Headquarters were assigned to my staff. That is Earl Martin and Walter Sapp. They worked for me. In no meetings or discussions, either formal or informal, did the name of Jarvis Wright ever come up.
This is just another reason the Coast Guard cannot be trusted to write history. Their motives are suspect. Anyone who would take a bow for recruiting white women as a minority deserves to be subjected to the strictest scrutiny before accepting such unbelievable claims more than 50 years after the fact. Could this be another case of Racial Kidnapping, as in the case of Michael Healey? The Coast Guard has been known to do this sort of this before. As President Reagan said “We must trust BUT verify”. Where is the proof? Show us a picture of Jarvis Wright? Or is he truly the invisible man?
Any student or writer of contemporary history has a duty to disclose his or her subjective values. This obligation is all the more imperative for an African American writing about the times and the events in which he lived. One must always seek to maintain critical distance from the subject. However, cold detachment is not required to be factually correct and objective. Twenty years after my Coast Guard career ended, has given me sufficient distance to reflect soberly upon a subject that I find infinitely fascinating. That is to say, why did it take so long to allow African Americans to serve in the Coast Guard officer corps. Also, since I found it so easy to recruit Black male high school graduates to the Academy, why was I run out of that job after I had demonstrated that it could be done.
All history is spin. The history of the first Black cadets to enter the Coast Guard Academy is too complex and too serious to be left primarily to Coast Guard Public Information Officers whose first impulse is to make the Coast Guard look good and honorable. The exclusion of African Americans from the Academy from 1867 until 1962 is a tragic fact of American history. My memory and interpretation of this history would be even more serious flawed than it undoubted is, were it not for the official records that I kept of every significant event that occurred in my life as a Coast Guard officer. My perspective my be subject to debate, but my facts are irrefutable.
The segregation of Black enlisted men in the ranks and the exclusion of Blacks from the officer training programs were legally sanctioned by the Doctrine of Plessey v Ferguson and its Jim Crow laws that this Nation accepted until the late 1960s. I was born and raised within that system. For the first 17 years of my life I existed on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
Were it not for President John F Kennedy, my class and status would have never afforded me an opportunity to attend the Coast Guard Academy, a previously all white institution. Try as I might, this Blog tends to bear the imprint of my early childhood in the segregated South. My recitation of what I view as facts my draw the ire of the casual white reader and bring forth accusations of lack of neutrality and bias.
My experience in the Coast Guard from 1968 to 1988, and the court-martial of Cadet Webster Smith helped me to understand why Black parents were so reluctant to hand over their sons to Coast Guard recruiters before I became the Chief of Minority Recruiting in 1972.
The MISSION of the United States Coast Guard Academy is to graduate young men and women with strong bodies, stout hearts, alert mind, with a liking for the sea and its lore, and with that high sense of honor loyalty and obedience that goes with trained initiative and leadership, well grounded in seamanship, the sciences and the amenities, and strong in the resolve to be worthy of the tradition of commissioned officers in the United States Coast Guard in service to humanity; but,a new strategic plan for the U.S. Coast Guard Academy purports to reiterate what the Academy's mission has always been: That is in modern parlance and in the aftermath of the court-martial of Webster Smith and a series of hate crime noose incidents, "to educate and train leaders of character." (12/25/2007, The Day)
Formulating this plan wasn't left to the Academy's senior leadership, said Rear. Adm. J. Scott Burhoe, Academy superintendent.
“We don't want it to be a plan that nobody looks at, and we don't want it to be a plan that doesn't include everybody,” he said. “So we took the opportunity to include as many people as we could in the planning process.”
Burhoe said of the previous plan, a complicated “strategic map” that the Academy has had since 2002, that “there were many people here who were not aware that any such plan existed.” (And many senior officers preferred to act as if it did not exist.)
Developing a plan was one of the recommendations of the Task Force on life at the Academy. It released its report in March 2007. The report said previous plans did not “provide the long-term integrated strategic planning and vision needed by the Academy.”
For this new plan staff members and faculty assessed the academy's strengths, such as the quality of the cadets, and the weaknesses, such as insufficient resources. The board of trustees received a draft version, which was also posted online so everyone at the Academy could see it and comment.
“It's less about the plan that we end up with, and really more about the conversations that you have,” Burhoe said. He said the discussions have helped everyone at the Academy find a common vision and understand the direction in which the school is headed.
The superintendent plans to present the final plan to the trustees for the April 2008 meeting, for possible approval.
The draft version says the strategic goals of the academy are to: (1)integrate leadership and character development into all aspects of life at the academy; (2)cultivate a community of inclusion; (3)advance and improve assessment and accountability; (4)enhance communication and partnerships; and (4) optimize resource use and shortfalls.
These goals are incorporated into the themes of the plan: to provide value to the Coast Guard; be an institution of excellence; and be nationally recognized as a premier institution for leadership and character development.
He did say that the plan includes items that the academy leadership would like to accomplish over the next three to five years. The assistant superintendent will be responsible for ensuring that the plan is being followed, and other senior staff members will help implement it. There will be five working groups, one for each goal, to track progress.
“In many instances the plan simply articulates who we already are, and what we've had in progress for some time,” Burhoe said. “It is a reminder of why we exist, and what we need to focus on to continue adding value to the Coast Guard, and the nation.”
connpost.com reports:
Several of state's colleges make list.
LINDA CONNER LAMBECK
Article Last Updated: 07/31/2008
"If it's nice dorms you're after, cross the U.S. Coast Guard Academy off your list of potential colleges.
Princeton Review's latest "The Best 368 Colleges" ranks the New London-based military academy second in the nation for having "dorms like dungeons," according to cadets who attend the school.
In the 17th annual report released this week by the Princeton Review, a New York education service company, 368 colleges and universities are listed as the "best" — but not by rank — in the nation. Those standings are made by Princeton editors based on academics, selectivity, financial aid, student feedback and site visits, said Robert Franek,a Princeton Review vice president.
The Coast Guard Academy, made the top 20 on 11 lists. Besides earning low marks for its dorms and campus library, the academy ranked third in sobriety, seventh in unhappiness and 14th in having conservative-minded classmates.
The Coast Guard Academy, made the top 20 on 11 lists. Besides earning low marks for its dorms and campus library, the academy ranked third in sobriety, seventh in unhappiness and 14th in having conservative-minded classmates.
the report includes top-20 lists of colleges and universities in 62 specific categories. Those lists are based on 80-question surveys taken by 120,000 students who attend schools listed in the book. About 95 percent of the surveys were completed online.
Surveys ask students about academics, campus life and themselves. They respond by marking one of five choices from "excellent" to "awful.""
You are right about this Jarvis Wright. He doesn't exist. I know this because he is my uncle Javis Wright. Try leaving out the letter "r" in Jarvis and you will come up with "Javis Wright". Now check your history and see what you come up with. Let me know at my email address at noni11122002@yahoo.com.
In the 60s-80s when we talked about "managing diversity", we really meant race and gender. Sadly, we still find ourselves well short of optimizing either or both of those elements. Both the enlightened intellectual and the practical project leaders of today see huge value in making certain his or her team is composed of members who bring not only gender and racial diversity but also a wide spectrum of skills and capabilities to the table. We want variations in expertise and age and MATURITY and ideas and CULRURE and any other factors of consequence that could help get the project done well. For too long we have celebrated what we had in common. That's OK, but the fault lies in pretending that we have everything in common. WE SURELY DO NOT and the better leader knows that and acts on that knowledge.
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