My job at the Naval Academy as I see it, and here at Military.com, is to use my position as insider/outsider to the benefit of the Navy and Marine Corps. I'm an insider/outsider because I'm an employee of the Department of the Navy, but I'm not in the Navy. And I'm about to begin my twentieth year of serving in the way I do, which is teaching officers-to-be how to tell good arguments from bad, and how to articulate the good ones in verbal and written communication, as well as getting from great literature what can be gotten. Most of the men and women who will read this serve the military in other ways.

The outsider part means I see the military from a different point of view.

My job is not so much to praise the virtues of the institution I've dedicated my life to -- the rah-rah insiders do a good job with that -- but to suggest ways to deal with the flaws. Because of my insider/outsider position, what I end up comparing the military with is my other world, academia.

On the surface, these two worlds couldn't be more different. They certainly don't seem to like each other. The more prestigious a college or university is, the more certain that it will resist having US military recruiters on campus. And I know from serving on the USNA admissions board that it's a cold day in hell for us to get an applicant who cross-applies with an Ivy, or with Swarthmore (or Williams, or Amherst, or Haverford-- where I went).

Typically people in the military don't think much of humanities and social science professors. Everybody knows they're all dangerous liberals, given to things like gay views of literature, the dreaded feminism (now in its third or fourth wave of post-something), denial of authority (there is no set of “classics”) and in general, an utter rejection of the respect and obedience that the military prizes as its greatest virtues. Worst of all, the radicals are now tenured and are telling our children how to think.

Besides, isn't it all just hot air? They don't do anything, really, except talk. And increasingly, just to each other. My students, midshipmen at the Naval Academy, laugh with relief when I encourage them to say out loud what they're thinking: namely that all these “interpretations” of literature they think I'm asking them for are made up by professors late at night in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the unsuspecting. They're always mighty surprised when I suggest to them that they can determine whether an “interpretation” is good or bad by looking at the evidence. Which, not so incidentally, is exactly what they do with, say, recon photos, in the fleet.

Unfortunately, this view of academics nowadays as dangerously ingrown is true. Humanities and social science professors are, in fact, nowadays typically out to show in every text they read either that somebody needs to stick it to the very power structure the military struggles so valiantly to uphold, or has done so. The magic words of praise are things like “de-centering” and “subversion.” The military wants to center -- hence the clear chain of command -- and strengthen the battlements, not undermine them.

Academics tend to think that they alone have “gotten” the fact that everything is relative; everything is subjective. At the same time, they're quite defensive, nursing a grudge over the fact that, in America, people don't actually care what college professors think -- unlike, say, France and Germany, where having a Ph.D. actually cuts you some mustard in the public realm.

I should say that I don't quite know where American academics get their defensiveness that makes them so preternaturally sullen. It's a bit like the teenagers in the 1960s who “rebelled” against Daddy's values (leaving the family every day to earn his paycheck) while using three thousand-dollar amplifiers for rock music denouncing materialism. You have to be pretty confident that the structure you're kvetching against isn't going to crumple in order for your whining to have a chance. In a world where there is no structure -- a lot of the Third World -- you wouldn't have anything to rebel against. Me, I think literature professors should be showing students how to use literature in their lives, not casting it as a perennial naysayer.

So on the surface, the military and academia are quite different. Yet under the surface, they seem like twins. Academics tend to think they're the only ones who “get it”; so do military professionals. Professors wield close to dictator's power in the classroom -- the dreaded “power of the grade.” But in the military the power may be even more absolute: the power of the evaluation or fitness report, the power to determine the course of someone's career. And what are you going to do in either case if you disagree with The Man? Suck it up?

Both the military and academics are typically convinced they're more virtuous than the normal run of mankind (see an upcoming piece). Both love their jargon, their insider-speak that makes them different. Both know what the pecking order is (very clear in the military; in academia it's almost as clear: Full Professor is the 0-6 who decides the fate of the newly-hired Assistant Professors; Ivies trump state schools, and those trump your local community college.) Both the military and academia create comfortable sinecures for the lucky few who rise to the top. And neither is based on the principles of free-market capitalism.

Both the military and academia exist to serve the larger world, and are responsible to it. The perks of both are only justified in that they make service possible (command in the military; tenure in academia). And people in both should never forget the reason they're given such responsibility, and so many bennies: the citizens at large they're there to serve.