At the U.S. Naval Academy, as I discovered by serving a year as a faculty member on the admissions board, we go out of our way to take in a surprising number of weak students in preference to stronger ones in the pursuit of our various ideological hobbyhorses: affirmative action for sports, selected racial minorities, and blatantly pro-military activities in high school. The academy also seems to be ideologically committed to the power of the individual to overcome all odds. In the academy’s conservative, military mind-set, everything is a “choice,” and motivation alone decides whether you succeed or fail. The only reason the Naval Academy can accept to explain why a student is failing is that he or she isn’t trying hard enough. Any other factors are irrelevant, and in any case are ruled out of court. The academy just doesn’t want to hear about them.
In the reports on students getting D’s and F’s, we’re supposed to say why, in our view, they’re doing unsatisfactory work. There’s only one response the system wants to hear: The student isn’t showing the proper motivation, not putting out the requisite effort. We’re out of line if we suggest that motivation alone may not be the answer.
I found that out the hard way one semester when I had to write a startling number of deficiency reports. Writing a report on one young man, a football player who couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag and whose sentences were of the “See Spot run” variety, I pointed out that he had been admitted with SAT verbal scores 100 points below what our minimum was supposed to be. That, I suggested, was the pretty obvious reason why he was so inept in my class.
The deans howled, I heard through my department chairwoman. The young man’s company officer objected in person. I was being “unprofessional” in expressing the opinion that this particular midshipman was working with a disadvantage that no “motivation” would overcome -- or at least apparently had not overcome. But if they think that anyone can be motivated to succeed, why look at things like grades and scores at all in admissions? Why crow about the number of people who are rejected? “Ten to one!” a former superintendent liked to boast, referring to the ratio of applicants to seats. “Better than Harvard!”
The academy’s attitude that personal motivation alone determines all outcomes is so dogged that it sometimes becomes frightening, rather than merely frustrating. Several years ago I had as a student a young man, a senior English major, whose failing first paper in my course brought him to my office for a session of what we call EI, “Extra Instruction.” Annapolis is one of the few institutions in the world where students have access to professors just because they ask for it: If they want an hour of our time, they get it. Here, tax dollars really are at work.
Typically the student comes in with an unsatisfactory paper (some come because they can’t think of anything to write: We talk). Usually I turn the failing paper face down and simply ask the student what main point or points he or she was trying to get across. It almost always makes sense. Then we look at the failing paper, where -- surprise! -- it turns out that these ideas aren’t so clearly laid out, though the student invariably thought they had been. The student typically sees this and leaves able to fix the problem.
But this EI session did not go as they usually do. This young man looked at me intently, asked a question that betrayed he’d understood nothing of what I had just said (itself a repetition of what he’d already heard in the classroom) and waited expectantly for me to re-teach once more the material on which the paper was to be based. For a minute or two, trying to act in the “never give up” spirit of the institution, I rose to the bait, though my voice sharpened as I talked. Then, slowing, I asked him to carry on in his own words, to summarize something he’d now heard for the third time. He was silent, then tried to begin, then fell silent again.
“Excuse me a minute,” I say. I turned away from him and pulled up his record on the computer: It was a mass of failed and repeated courses. His SAT scores were, for a white boy, rock bottom. (Later he told me he’d taken the SAT a dozen times; what’s recorded and used in admissions is a mix-and-match pairing of the highest score on each part, whenever this was achieved.) When I asked a moment later, he told me he’d become an English major because he’d been getting C’s in his English courses rather than the D’s and F’s he was receiving in other courses.
“Look,” I finally say, turning back to him. “An EI session isn’t supposed to be about me teaching the material again just for you. What did you understand of what I said in class?”
And then it all comes out: nothing. He is in despair, apparently eager to confess his cluelessness. “Sir, I don’t understand anything.”
“Nothing?” I ask, unbelievingly.
“No, sir,” he says.
What am I supposed to say to this?
“It’s not like I don’t try,” he hurries on. “I spent hours on this paper. I just don’t understand what you say in class.” And then the floodgates open: his sense of having to fake it in class after class, his inability to get even the faintest glimmer of the main idea of the text, the torture of sitting in class while it all washes over him, his endless sessions of EI with professors accustomed to giving EI until they are blue in the face, class after class, semester after semester, that had allowed him to get this far.
“I’ve always had problems understanding the point of what I read,” the young man, now brutally open with me, offers. “I don’t know what other people are thinking,” he adds miserably.
And suddenly I had him pegged.
“I think you have Asperger Syndrome -- mild autism,” I tell him bluntly. I explain to him what it is. I make educated guesses about his life, his symptoms. He looks at me as if I am a magician, nodding, interrupting me to agree. He is touchingly cooperative, apparently for the first time talking to someone with whom he doesn’t have to pretend.
I see no reason to pull the punch. He is at the end of his rope, and I of mine -- not to mention the system at the end of its. I tell him pleasantly that in my educated but nonprofessional opinion, he has a learning and cognitive disability that should be professionally evaluated. There are strategies for dealing with Asperger’s, if no outright cure. One of the hallmarks of even mild autism is lack of empathy for others. “Aspies,” as they are sometimes called, just don’t understand how other people think -- a very real danger in a command situation.
I add that I don’t think he should be an officer in the Navy, and I’ll have to say so in my six-week report. We’re asked explicitly to give a recommendation: Retain or separate. Only we can’t say “Separate because of intrinsic unsuitability,” only “Separate because he (or she) has a bad attitude.”
This is the institution that continually talks about how not making a rack (bed) properly leads to loss of lives. How much worse is it to let loose in the fleet someone with impaired cognitive faculties? Perhaps we could say, assuming I chose not to pursue it and merely let him scrape through the academy the way he’d scraped through this far, that the likelihood was high that his superiors would at some point realize he was different. They might not know why, but they’d know. And they’d assign him to a desk job. But what guarantee do we have of that? If the academy passed the buck, why wouldn’t people in the fleet?
In any case, I tell my student, he is abusing the EI system, which wasn’t set up to take care of people who need such massive intervention. It is meant as an occasional aid for students who basically get the point. He needs much more structured and concentrated intervention. But I can’t guarantee that the academy can accommodate his needs. I don’t know that we have the facilities. Graduation is not guaranteed.
At this he becomes upset: His parents will never accept this. They will sue the academy if the academy tries to throw him out. They have worked their fingers to the bone. Even when others suggested that he had problems, his parents have always insisted there is nothing wrong with him.
At the mention of other people who suggested that he had problems, my ears perk up. Of course, I think, both ruefully and with relief, I’m not the first person to notice. I don’t have to carry this whole burden by myself.
“Were these suggestions followed up?” I ask. “Have you ever been tested?”
He comes clean on this, too. It turns out I’m not even the first person to flag him as a likely case of autism-spectrum disorder. A history professor who oversaw his work last year wrote countless e-mail messages to the powers that be demanding that he be tested. They were ignored.
I unload on our department chairwoman, who calls admissions. They assure her stiffly that we do not admit people with learning disabilities. Therefore, this young man cannot have such disabilities.
I begin writing e-mail messages to deans, explaining both how unfair it is to this young man and how potentially dangerous it is to the Navy to ignore what seems such a likely diagnosis.
The response comes back: Testing would be a black spot on his record. They won’t do it.
I respond by saying there would be no more Band-Aid EI sessions, since they are creating a false picture of normalcy. I explain that I’m not doing the student, or the Navy, a favor by teaching and re-teaching the material to him one on one, so that he can squeak through once again by memorizing enough to pass a test. My response, I later learn, is deemed “unprofessional,” the adjective used when the military doesn’t know what to make of something.
I contact my colleague in the history department, who is sympathetic and corroborates my reactions and the EI experience, but tells me she has no illusions: She’s gotten exactly the same reaction. I’m just the next in line to be told that all our students are fine, and that motivation is everything.
The young man himself lets it be widely known that I don’t “like” him. At that I have to acknowledge myself bested. It is the ultimate trump in a system that insists the individual can achieve anything he wants. My objections to him could, in such a system, be merely individual as well. I accept his painfully cobbled-together Potemkin-village memorizations as adequate for a passing grade. He duly graduates from the Naval Academy, and so far as I know, is in the Navy today. It’ll take most people a while to figure out what they’re looking at, and by then he may have served his time -- if everyone is lucky, without being responsible for any deaths.
At what point will we let go of our dogma that individual effort determines all and face the fact that it doesn’t?
Another young man of a few years ago provided an even more chilling example of the downside to the system’s dogged assertion that motivation alone determines performance. He was very bright, but clearly strange. He’d go without sleep for days on end, he told me, talk a mile a minute in my presence, free-associate, and carry on verbally as if flying high on something illegal -- or as if afflicted by what used to be called manic depression, now called bipolar disorder. He took to writing 10-page e-mail messages to professors -- nothing suggestive or inappropriate, just wild flights about James Joyce.
This time a lot of people, at least in the English department, thought the young man was indeed acting strange. I wrote e-mail messages to the deans suggesting what, in layman’s terms, might be afoot. For everyone’s safety, including his own, surely he should, I suggested, be professionally tested. Once again, no one would hear of this. Merely visiting a psychologist was bad for his career; being tested was the end of the road. All midshipmen were fine. Perhaps he should get more sleep.
This young man graduated, too; only in this case I know what happened next. The specialty school -- Nuclear Power -- noticed that he wasn’t sleeping and that he talked too fast. No buck-passing there; too much was at stake. By now an ensign, my ex-student was tested and determined to be, in fact, bipolar. The Navy discharged him.
Annapolis had insisted that he was “good to go.”
Bruce Fleming is a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. This essay is excerpted from his book Annapolis Autumn: Life, Death, and Literature at the U.S. Naval Academy, published this month by the New Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 2, Page B9