Naval Academy's Recruiting Loses Its Starch

Flashy TV Spots, Graphic Novel Aim To Draw Recruits With More Diversity

As the Naval Academy launches into a new school year, its superintendent has unveiled a recruiting effort that includes flashy TV commercials and a graphic novel in a bid for more minority students.

The academy's superintendent, Vice Adm. Jeffrey L. Fowler, showed the new ads in an interview with reporters last week. He called the academy's old ads too fusty to stir the imagination of today's recruits.

"It's for a young, diverse, achieving group who want to, as the theme says, achieve their destiny," he said. "You can come here and become a doctor. You can become an astronaut. You can fly jets for the Marine Corps."

The ads, laden with special effects, focus on five real-life midshipmen at the academy and their dream careers with the Navy. A player on the football team morphs into a battle-hardened warrior on a dark battlefield. A singer on the gospel choir transforms mid-shot into a pilot in the cockpit of a fighter jet. A tutor at the academy becomes a Navy doctor.

Few details were available about the graphic novel, which will probably debut this fall. Academy officials said it takes an action-hero approach to the life of a midshipman, and the plot uses as one location the crypt of Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones under the academy's chapel.

The midshipmen are shown taking their place in a future that's very dangerous for the United States, Fowler said of the comic's storyline, "and if they choose . . . not to go down that path, America may suffer the consequences."

Fowler, who spent almost three years as commander of Navy recruitment, said such marketing efforts are aimed at bolstering diversity among the ranks of officers.

Roughly 28 percent of this year's incoming class is from a minority racial or ethnic group, the highest percentage ever at the academy. But that falls short of the numbers among enlisted ranks, which include 47 percent from minority groups.

It took about a generation to get the enlisted force to 47 percent, which roughly mirrors the makeup of the country, Fowler said. "I think it's going to take a generation to get our officer corps also to represent America. So my goal is to get moving down that path at the Naval Academy."

The academy, he said, is also looking for geographic diversity and will recruit from underrepresented regions of the country.

The new ads will air during Navy football games, when the academy has free airtime. And more commercials are in the works. Each of the five midshipmen featured in the current 60-second ad will have their own 30-second extended commercial in which they recount the personal journeys that brought them to the academy.

At the meeting last week, Fowler also answered questions about several controversies that have arisen during his first year as superintendent.

He said he has no plans to stop the nondenominational noon prayers before lunch at the academy. The American Civil Liberties Union has pushed to end the prayers, which it says force midshipmen to perform a religious observance.

Fowler said the noon prayers are voluntary and have existed at the academy since 1845. The Navy allows for moments of prayer in the fleet, he noted, and the noon prayers help prepare them for life in the fleet.

"We just don't see why we would change it, because we don't see anything wrong with what we're doing," Fowler said.

Another tradition that has provoked debate over the past year is the practice of flag dipping before the chapel's altar cross during Protestant services. Religious freedom activists say the practice violates separation of church and state by implying a subservience of the military to God.

Fowler suspended the flag dipping while he reviewed it with campus officials, but this spring he reinstituted it. He said last week that he worried initially that it was not a good example for midshipmen because it is not done anywhere else in the Navy. "But the congregation so missed this practice, which had been going on a long time," he said, "that after talking to the chaplains, I became convinced . . . that it's okay."