English Department History 1845-2002

The United States Naval Academy opened its doors to midshipmen in October 1845, and the teaching of English began the same month when George Jones, the first Chaplain, also led the first classes in grammar and rhetoric.  Jones, a Yale-educated polymath who accompanied Matthew Perry to Japan as a translator and later took astronomical observations in the Andes, was only the first in a long line of inspiring instructors who have taught generations of midshipmen to look at the written word, and the world, with a discriminating eye.  As originally constituted, the English Department was responsible for teaching a wide range of subjects -- “ethics, grammar, rhetoric, geography, political science, and history”; indeed, it covered much the same territory as today’s Division of Humanities and Social Sciences.  On his departure in 1852, Jones was succeeded by a group of young civilian professors who shaped the English Department during the infancy of the Academy.  These same faculty shepherded their discipline and their students through the shocks and dislocations of the Civil War, most notably the removal of the Academy in 1861 to Newport, Rhode Island, to escape the Confederate sympathies of the Annapolis citizenry.

On its return to Annapolis in 1867, the Academy was in a disheveled state.  In a report to superintendent Admiral David Porter in April 1869, department head Lieutenant Commander F. B. Blake lamented that instruction was impeded by the poor preparation of the students: “Many of the Midshipmen who enter the Academy labor under serious disadvantages, arising from the deficiency of their primary education; and many of them enter, having already acquired faulty modes of expression, and habits of writing, which only time and practice can correct.”  But the English faculty, he observed with pride, were up to the challenge: “The errors which most frequently occur in composition, and the more glaring offenses against good taste, are pointed out, and the methods of correcting them are illustrated in practical exercises.”

Admiral Porter’s survey of the departments was a preliminary step in his reorganization of the Academy.  Convinced that Midshipmen were best taught by naval officers, Porter removed civilians as department heads and stressed technical and professional training over subjects he considered merely academic.  The English faculty was decimated by Porter’s action; the most serious loss was Professor Thomas G. Ford, author of the first history of the Naval Academy, who resigned in protest and retired to Italy to write and pursue his research.  The quarter-century following Porter’s reforms was a period of extreme educational conservatism at the Naval Academy, and the teaching of English proceeded in its traditional path, untouched by the great innovations that were reshaping American higher education.

This period of stagnation ended with the expansion of the Navy, and a corresponding expansion of the Academy, in the wake of the Spanish-American War.  In 1903 the English Department recommenced hiring civilian instructors to supplement the dwindling supply of officer faculty.  This generation of civilian faculty revolutionized the department: holding Ph.D.s from the nation’s leading universities, they transformed what had become little more than a glorified preparatory program into a nationally known center for literary and historical research.  These new faculty -- William Oliver Stevens, Carroll Storrs Alden, Herman Krafft, and Horace Fenton, to name only the most prominent -- first introduced the systematic study of literature into the midshipman curriculum.  Although most of these men held their Ph.D.s in literature, many of them emerged as distinguished historians during their Academy careers.  Stevens, the author of 49 books and innumerable articles, wrote a series of naval textbooks; with his younger colleague, Allan Westcott, he was the first to write a history of seapower from ancient to modern times.  Alden wrote notable biographies of Commodore Lawrence Kearny and Horatio Nelson while Krafft modernized the Naval Academy Museum during his long tenure as director.  English department faculty contributed notably to the Annapolis community as well:  Stevens and his wife were leaders of the women’s suffrage movement while Horace Fenton founded the Anne Arundel County Library system.  The Masqueraders, founded in 1907 and still flourishing today, provided top-flight amateur theatrical entertainment for midshipmen and townspeople alike.

The conditions under which the civilian instructors worked in the first years of the century were difficult: salaries were poor, contracts were renewed on a yearly basis, and misunderstandings arising from the differences between military and civilian customs caused incessant friction.  In 1917 Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels appointed a commission headed by Edwin A. Alderman, the president of University of Virginia, to investigate the situation of the civilian faculty at the Academy.  The commission’s recommendations, which were put into effect in 1919, tripled salaries, lengthened the contract period to five years, and generally brought the Academy’s personnel procedures into line with those of other colleges and universities.

In 1917 Secretary Daniels appointed C. Alphonso Smith, the Poe Professor of English at the University of Virginia, to be head of the English department; he was the first civilian to lead an academic department since the superintendency of Admiral Porter some fifty years earlier.  A distinguished authority on the short-story writer O. Henry as well as the author of several books on literature for popular audiences, Smith struck up an immediate rapport with the midshipmen, who affectionately called the portly professor by the nickname “Beefy.”  Smith was famous for his inspiring lectures as well as his clever ploys for getting the midshipmen to expand their reading: he ensured that the entire Brigade thoroughly perused Boccaccio’s Decameron by warning his classes, “No gentleman should read it.”

On his unexpected death in June 1924 Smith was succeeded as department head by Carroll Alden.  The 1920s and the 1930s were a period of retrenchment for the Academy and the English Department: the down-sizing of the Academy following World War I and then again during the Great Depression led to a smaller Brigade and faculty lay-offs.  One positive step was superintendent Thomas C. Hart’s reform of the curriculum, which had among its objects a renewed emphasis on cultural subjects.  In 1933-34 Hart devolved the teaching of social sciences to a new Department of Economics and Government; the English and History Department devised an innovative course on Comparative Literature that was mandatory for all second-class midshipmen.  Additionally, for the first time a pension system was instituted for civilian faculty.  Most of Hart’s innovations, however, were short-lived: after his departure the two departments were recombined in 1937, and the Comparative Literature course disappeared in 1939.  One of the few bright lights to remain aglow during this decade was the Masqueraders which, under the inspiration of faculty advisor Allan Blow Cook, began to stage the latest Broadway musicals in a Mahan Hall illuminated by tens of thousands of blinking electric lights.

World War II dimmed the Mahan marquee and ushered in revolutionary changes for the English Department.  On his retirement in June 1941, Carroll Alden was succeeded as head of the department by a naval officer: military officers would fill the post for the next 29 years.  The needs of the wartime Navy led to skyrocketing enrollments and a concomitant increase in the number of faculty; most of these new instructors were in uniform themselves.  After the close of the war, many of these men left the service and formed the nucleus of a new civilian faculty.

The upheavals of the 1960s on American campuses reverberated, albeit on a lower register, at the United States Naval Academy.  Dissatisfaction with administration interference in grading policies erupted in a faculty protest, led by members of the English, History, and Government Department, that received national attention.  The Department of the Navy recognized that the curriculum of the Naval Academy required a major overhaul, and Admiral James F. Calvert was named superintendent to implement the needed changes.

In 1970 the English, History, and Government Department was formally distilled into its constituent elements as part of Admiral Calvert’s reorganization of the academic departments.  Over the next few years the new, streamlined English Department established the basic curriculum and majors program that still prevail today: a year-long course in rhetoric and literature for all midshipmen followed by a graduated sequence of courses that address major literary problems, genres, and periods, both British and American.  This structure reflected the department's stated philosophy that understanding various approaches to literature was more important "than the illusory mastery of any specific content."  The majors program fueled further curriculum initiatives that enabled midshipmen to see the relevance of literature to broader cultural and social issues.  The department introduced the first courses in non-western literature, it established joint tutorials with neighboring St. John's College, and it permitted selected senior midshipmen to teach plebe sections for academic credit.

Desiring to encourage midshipmen literary interests, the English Department also inaugurated several extracurricular activities which still exist today.  The Churchill Society was founded in 1972 to supplement the Academy’s English curriculum by sponsoring lectures, films and “other programs of interest to students of literature.”  The Cultural Affairs Program has enabled tens of thousands of midshipmen to attend plays, concerts, and dance performances in Washington and Baltimore.  Sigma Tau Delta chartered a chapter to recognize individual midshipman academic excellence in English courses.  Similarly, the literary magazine Labyrinth provided a lively forum for midshipmen creative writing.

Recognition of the department's fundamental mission found expression in the Report of the Middle States Accreditation Committee in 1975:  "We applaud the consistent and continuing emphasis upon improving and developing writing skills in the English Department, and its recognition that precision in written and oral communication is imperative for the Naval officer."

In recent years the English Department has continued to remain in the forefront of curricular and pedagogical innovation.  In 1984 the department opened the doors of the Writing Center, which provides tutorial assistance to all midshipmen and has taken the central role in placing writing and communications skills at the top of the Academy’s agenda.  In the same year the department established the English Honors Program in an effort to recognize and challenge its most gifted majors. The Academy and the department have also been in the forefront of innovations in information technology.  By 1987 word-processing had been fully integrated into the curriculum; the implementation of links to the Internet and in 1996 the creation of the first English Department Home Page have subsequently revolutionized the way both faculty and midshipmen teach and learn.  Since 1990 midshipmen have been able to study visual media in a sustained and serious way with the addition to the curriculum of HH307, Literature and Film, and periodic interdisciplinary special topics courses.

The last fifteen years have witnessed several potentially important innovations in how the department staffs its military billets.  After intensive lobbying by the English Department and the Naval Academy, in 1987 the Department of the Navy created a P-Code, or designator, that recognized a postgraduate degree in English or Comparative Literature as a qualification of value to the Naval service.  This decision opened the door for midshipman English majors to participate in the Voluntary Graduate Education Program (VGEP), which allows them to pursue a graduate degree while still enrolled at the Academy, and (IGEP), Immediate Graduate Education Program, which facilitates graduate study immediately after commissioning.  In 1998 the Navy implemented the Permanent Military Professor (PMP) Program, which enables an elite group of qualified officers to follow a career track as educators at the Academy.  The English Department’s first candidate for the program, CDR Mark Larrabee, was selected June 2000; after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, he will join the department as a military assistant professor.

The English Department closed the twentieth century with the complete renovation of its quarters in Sampson Hall.  After an eventful year billeted in the midshipman dormitory, Bancroft Hall, the department returned to totally new offices, classrooms, and equipment in August 2000.

The English Department has changed dramatically in the 157 years since its founding, but it remains true to its roots.  The same emphasis on effective writing; the same exploration of ethical issues through literature; and, ultimately, the same dedication to the mission of preparing outstanding professional officers still direct the course of the English Department today.