Our Say: Academy can't let its honor standards erode

The Naval Academy hews to high standards in a world in which standards are constantly being diluted. It insists on personal accountability in an era in which individuals are allowed - almost encouraged - to blame others for their failures. It inculcates leadership in a society that sometimes seems obsessed with followership.

At least that's the ideal - an ideal that the academy manages to uphold to a remarkable extent. But our recent package of stories provided grounds for worrying - if not necessarily for concluding - that the academy's all-important Honor Concept is yielding to our society's pervasive reluctance to draw hard-and-fast lines.

Some academy graduates were concerned enough to use the federal Freedom of Information Act to request information on the handling of recent honor violations. Ultimately, some 2,500 pages of disorganized and heavily redacted documents, covering honor cases from 2005 to 2007, were made available to them. They shared the material with us; we did our own analysis.

One disturbing trend the graduates noted: conspiracies to commit honor violations ending not in expulsions but in flurries of mild-mannered "remediation," including such requirements as writing papers on "moral courage and integrity" and keeping "integrity journals."

As Annapolis attorney William Ferris, Class of 1970, noted, honor proceedings have multiplied, but fear of being kicked out of the academy over an infraction of the honor code has waned.

The current Commandant of Midshipmen, Capt. Matthew Klunder, admits that the emphasis is now on retaining errant midshipmen, not on making examples of them. Mids are seen as assets into whom a lot of time and effort have been poured, so there's an inevitable tendency to strive to minimize attrition, whether by providing more academic help or viewing the Honor Concept system mainly as a teaching tool.

Klunder makes some good points in answer to the graduates' concerns. The old all-or-nothing approach has given way to a recognition that there are lots of minor violations that call for less-than-draconian punishment. Mids themselves handle the proceedings - under the oversight of commissioned officers - and can use these decisions to learn about leadership.

We hardly want a return to the good old days of letting midshipmen handle accusations of honor violations by pummeling each other in marathon boxing matches - or "separating" a mid by stripping him of his insignia in front of the entire class and marching him out a gate.

But we don't want the academy to lose sight of the fact that being a midshipmen is a privilege, not a right - and a privilege that should only be extended to young men and women already mature enough to know the difference between right and wrong, even if they don't yet grasp every nuance of the 95-page book that explains the Honor Concept.

Unfortunately, you can't remediate misconduct in a war zone. So the Navy can't afford unlimited patience with mids who can't maintain their integrity under the lighter pressures of academy life.