The youngest general on active duty in the U.S. armed forces is Command Pilot Robert F. McDermott, 41. He was 109th in his West Point Class of 409 in 1943, won the Bronze Star and Air Medal with five Oak Leaf clusters flying a P-38 with the Ninth Air Force in World War II, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1950. Not long ago he belonged to that tiny covey of airmen who might some day soar to Chief of Staff. So when he began a teaching stint at the new Air Force Academy and did well enough to be asked to stay on, Brigadier General McDermott braced for a career crash landing. The Air Force moves up flyers and commanders, but it will not give top rank to teachers.
Now McDermott, who will never rise even to major general, is happily grounded at the academy campus north of Colorado Springs. By hard choice he signed on as a permanent professor of economics, and in 1959 became dean of the 321-man faculty. “The challenge was really overriding,” he explains.
Last week, as it launched its seventh eleven-month academic year with more (2,224) cadets than ever, the youngest service academy could well be proud of Dean McDermott’s decision. He has al ready put over a rigorous “enrichment” program (since copied at Annapolis and West Point), in which more than three-fourths of the cadets slave for extra credit. He started a sabbatical program of sending instructors as far afield as Cambridge “to keep our staff up to date.” He is pushing for a Master’s program, the first at any service academy. Instead of congressional appointments, he wants a national competition to pick cadets (only the Coast Guard Academy does so). But most revealing is the eagerness of other pilots to land beside Dean McDermott. Like him, they seem to feel that teaching tops future power and glory.
11,000 Applicants. In addition to officer-teachers who put in a brief tour, the Air Academy is allowed 22 permanent professors, who rank as full colonels and heads of departments until retirement. So far the academy has only eight such professors—but not for lack of applicants. “Some 11,000 applications for teaching are on file from active-duty officers,” says Major General William S. Stone, superintendent of the academy. Stone’s main problem is finding men of staggered ages to prevent future mass retirement.
Those already picked would do credit to any campus. Often against advice from brother officers (“They said I was selling my career short”), the new professors have chucked everything, as one of them says, “to get a tremendous educational institution started.” Head of the law department is Colonel Christopher Munch, 40, a West Pointer (’43) with a law degree from the University of Illinois, who says: “I’d rather do this than anything in the Air Force—including Judge Advocate General.”
Out of Bureaucracy. No one echoes that pride more loudly than the youngest and newest permanent professor: red-haired Colonel Wesley Posvar, 35, head of the political science department. A West Pointer (’46) and Rhodes scholar (international relations), Pilot Posvar was picked in 1959 by the National Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the U.S.’s ten outstanding young men. In civilian life, say his colleagues, Posvar would be a bargain at four or five times his current $9,000 annual base pay. “Becoming a professor was a very difficult choice,” says Posvar. “Almost everyone advised against it.”
What persuaded Posvar was a tour of duty in the Pentagon, where he was “frustrated by the ineffectiveness of any individual in a bureaucracy. I couldn’t make a contribution to our country’s security in the Pentagon. But there’s a lot you can do here to broaden the horizon of thinking. We’re instructing our country’s future policymakers.”
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