October 4, 2011
Lieutenant Molly Crabbe is an expert helicopter pilot who has toured the Persian Gulf with her combat squadron. Dean Mary Miller is a Mayan art specialist with over thirty years of experience on the Yale faculty. Different though they may be, these two women and their colleagues have joined in a partnership that symbolizes a much larger one: the accord between the U.S. Navy and Yale.
The Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps is a program that turns undergraduates into midshipmen on 71 college campuses across the country. Yale was one of the original six universities to host the program, but forty years of separation has left the two organizations in need of re-introduction.
That task of matchmaking has fallen largely to Dean William Whobrey, a twenty-five year veteran of the Army who is uniquely positioned to translate between “Yale-speak,” as he puts it, and military parlance. He understands that each organization is complex, even inscrutable to outsiders. Just as “most academics know little about the military,” there is “nothing obvious about the way we do things” here at Yale, he says. Both partners have an idiosyncratic hierarchy, and mixing up provosts with deans could be as thorny as confusing commanders with admirals.
On September 19, Rear Adm. Rick Breckenridge, commander, Submarine Group Two, hosted Yale visitors at the New London Submarine Base. (From left to right: Dean Gordon, Debra Johns, Professor Roman Kuc, Rear Adm. Breckenridge, Dean Miller, Dean Vanderlick, Dean Wilczynski, Capt. Harrell.)
The organizations differ, of course, in their experience with the ROTC program. Lieutenant Crabbe and her commanding officer, Captain Ron Harrell, are the current instructors of the unit at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Both officers embrace their roles as teachers and mentors; Capt. Harrell sounds like the ideal coach who is “humbled” when speaking with parents and “most proud” of his students when they graduate and earn commission.
As experienced ROTC instructors, Lt. Crabbe and Capt. Harrell can paint an accurate picture of how the program will look at Yale. “The program is pretty stable,” explains Capt. Harrell, compared both with the Navy’s other campuses and with the Yale program that existed before 1973. Midshipmen will meet for physical training once a week, classes twice a week, and a weekly “lab” that could include sailing, marching, drill, or guest speakers. These time commitments are minimum standards, as the officers emphasize that level of activity is allowed to vary among individuals whose “foremost job is being a Yale student.” The program has evolved in some ways since it last appeared at Yale, now commissioning students into the Marine Corps as well as the Navy. Not to mention, of course, that, “you wouldn’t have seen Molly in the 1960s,” as Capt. Harrell wryly notes.
Yale and the Navy’s responsibilities overlap in one crucial sector: the admissions process. One of the few things harder than getting into Yale is winning an ROTC scholarship in addition; high school students must apply to both programs independently. On the ROTC application, students rank the five universities where they’d most like to don the blue and gold. Lt. Crabbe thinks the appeal of the new unit will be obvious: “You get to come to Yale.” She has already spoken with fifteen high school seniors who are seriously interested in joining ROTC when it launches in Fall 2012.
Both officers feel strongly that Yale’s culture of “public service” will attract plenty of recruits. And the expansion of that culture is exactly why Dean Miller finds ROTC so necessary in the first place: “We have not had an easy and obvious route for our students who seek to serve their nation at the very highest levels. And we want to make sure that it is one of the categories our students consider.” In early September, the University signed an agreement to establish an ROTC Air Force detachment at Yale, further adding to students’ options to serve.
Cmdr. John McGunnigle, and Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Anderson, commanding and executive officers of the USS New Hampshire, invite the group aboard.
The ROTC application considers the same factors that Yale does: first academics, then leadership and service. And like recruited athletes, midshipmen are subject to the final word of Yale’s gatekeepers in the Office of Admissions. Lt. Crabbe offers a perspective that might be useful for all over-stressed college applicants: they don’t need to have their entire lives planned out. “We don’t expect them to know,” she says, “whether they plan on the short term or thirty years” in the Navy.
“Everyone at Yale has been extremely helpful,” Lt. Crabbe raves. “Everyone we’ve met in the Navy has been extremely impressive,” Dean Gordon echoes her. He was pleased to learn that the Navy is interested in students with diverse political views, but points out that none of this should be a surprise. After all, Lt. Crabbe and Capt. Harrell have been working for years at Holy Cross, a liberal arts school with need-blind admission that shares the same five most popular majors with Yale. The officers’ role on campus this year has been substantial—weekly visits, briefing the Deans, returning phone calls, making people across the University aware of ROTC—but they’ve done this before.
Yale, too, has done this before. The legacy of its first NROTC unit will be a part of the new program; Capt. Harrell has recovered an original Yale ROTC pin and is proud “to restore some of that history.” The official Yale ROTC flag rests safely in Dean Whobrey’s office as a symbol of the alliance between the two storied organizations.
And for all that, Dean Gordon keenly studies an iPhone app with pictures of military emblems and their corresponding ranks. It’s too easy, he knows, to get lost in translation.
For further information on Naval and Air Force ROTC programs at Yale, visit http://rotc.yale.edu/.
This story was written and reported by Jeff Gordon '12. A senior in Saybrook College, Jeff is an American Studies major and the former President of the Yale College Council.
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