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Chris Mayer is an associate dean for strategy and initiatives, an associate professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and a colonel in the U.S. Army. I first ran across Mayer on his active Twitter feed, @ChrisMayer_WP. Mayer generously offered to
answer my questions about academic life within the military, his thoughts on COVID-19 and the academy, and the future of higher education. Please note that the views expressed in this article are Chris Mayer’s and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.
Q: I’d like to start by trying to understand the world of the U.S. service academies. These include West Point (where you are) and the four other academies for the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard and the Merchant Marine. Can you provide insights into where the service academies fit into the broader postsecondary ecosystem, and maybe some points of distinction and differentiation?
A: Service academies have the mission of developing and graduating leaders of character to serve as officers in their respective services. The United States Military Academy’s (West Point) graduates are commissioned as Army officers, United States Naval Academy graduates as Naval officers, United States Air Force Academy graduates as Air Force officers, United States Coast Guard graduates as Coast Guard officers, and United States Merchant Marine Academy graduates become licensed Merchant Marine officers or commissioned officers in the armed forces. Students at service academies do not pay tuition or room or board, but they do have a service obligation once they graduate (West Point graduates have a five-year active-duty service obligation).
Service academy graduates receive an accredited bachelor’s degree and can major in the types of disciplines you would find at colleges and universities across the country, but they also complete intense military, physical and character development programs so they are prepared to lead once they graduate. Character development serves as a foundation for all we do and is integrated throughout their experiences as a cadet. Summers are busy with military training along with some opportunities for academic, physical and character development. West Point has a rigorous core curriculum with course requirements that range from history, philosophy and literature to engineering (for nonengineering majors), physics and economics. Admissions to service academies is competitive.
Q: You are an associate dean and a professor. What was your career path to get to where you are now? Who serves on the West Point faculty?
A: West Point’s faculty model is deliberately designed to bring together individuals with different backgrounds to best advance the West Point mission. A combination of full-time military and civilian faculty members make up what West Point calls its faculty blend of excellence. Over half of our faculty members are Army officers who, at around their eighth year of service as Army officers, attend top graduate schools and serve on the faculty for two or three years. They are not only invaluable for the energy and cutting-edge ideas from graduate education they bring to the classroom, but they are also essential for preparing cadets for their service as officers, as these faculty members have recently led the organizations our graduates will join as platoon leaders. We call our rotating military faculty members our second graduating class, because they depart West Point with additional skills, knowledge and experience they develop while in graduate school, from the mentoring from senior faculty they receive at West Point, and from developing cadets in and out of the classroom.
Over a quarter of our faculty are civilian faculty members who are tenured, on the tenure track or on term appointments. They provide continuity and strong connections to higher education and society and bring in the latest ideas from graduate school. Finally, our senior military faculty are less than a quarter of our faculty and bring together careers of leadership experience in the Army with academic expertise. They, along with our senior civilian faculty members, lead our academic programs, oversee the curriculum and share in the governance of the academy. Faculty members support cadets in their military training, physical development and character development.
In terms of my path to West Point, I am a 1993 graduate and served in staff and leadership positions at Fort Campbell, Ky., and in Japan, along with completing Army schools to prepare me for those assignments, prior to being selected to serve on the West Point faculty. I completed a master’s in philosophy at Virginia Tech after which I taught at West Point for three years. After teaching at West Point, I served at Fort Monroe, Va., and in Iraq and was then selected for a senior military faculty position. Prior to returning to West Point in 2010, I completed a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. I taught in the Department of English and Philosophy for four years and then assumed an associate dean position. I still teach the core philosophy course along with courses for the philosophy major.
Q: What is going on at West Point concerning the fall semester and COVID-19? Do you think the strategies around academic continuity at West Point differ from those of nonmilitary colleges and universities?
A: West Point has a test, treat and monitor strategy that enables us to balance risk to our mission with risk to our cadets, staff, faculty and community. Nonpharmaceutical interventions and cleaning protocols have been put into place across the academy to limit COVID-19’s spread. Many cadets returned during the summer for training, and the remainder arrived a few weeks before the first day of class. In terms of teaching, we are conducting classes remotely, in person and hybrid. Because we are an Army post, we can limit and screen who comes onto West Point. All cadets live on post, and right now they are required to remain on post. This is, of course, hard for our cadets, because they typically are able to depart during many weekends, but West Point is like a small town, with faculty and staff housing, a grocery store, a few places to eat, and even a bowling alley.
We have also been working hard to offer more recreational activities for cadets. Our ability to properly educate, train and inspire cadets impacts the Army’s readiness, so it is essential that we have cadets here completing the programs designed to develop them into leaders of character who will be commissioned as Army officers. The military and academic expertise we have across our staff and faculty, along with a superintendent (president) who commanded the U.S. military support to the Ebola outbreak, was very helpful as we responded to the COVID outbreak and prepared to bring cadets back to West Point.
Q: Can you briefly sketch how West Point is thinking about the future of teaching and learning? Where might online education fit into this picture? What do you expect to change dramatically in the next decade or so, and what do you expect will stay the same?
A: We changed our curriculum five years ago, and we continue to assess its effectiveness. We will begin the process of reviewing it in a few years. Two years ago, we formed a group called Academics 2052, which is the 250th anniversary of West Point, to help us think about the future of academics at West Point. The group researched and drafted papers on the future of war and the security environment, higher education, work, and society. These papers were presented to academic leaders at our 2019 on-site. Last year we continued the conversation by engaging with external experts to explore many of the topics presented in the papers.
This year we will continue to identify relevant areas for exploration, scan the horizon and possibly create scenarios to inform our academic leader transition that will occur next summer, our next review of the curriculum and our next strategic plan. This will include considering what qualities Army officers need to possess given the changing nature of conflict, technological advances and other changes, as well as possible changes related to higher education, work and society.
One of the rankings we are most proud of is that we have been ranked for a number of years as having the most accessible faculty in the country (Princeton Review). Our small, in-person classes and frequent and meaningful in-person faculty-cadet interactions outside of the classroom promote this accessibility. This will always serve as the foundation of our model, but we have much to learn from the remote teaching we did in the spring and are currently doing in the fall. We are also about to begin renovation of all of our academic buildings, which will impact how we work and teach.
