A liberal arts school; Officer Candidate School. These two places connote starkly different environments. One is associated with poetry readings and well-landscaped quads; the other evokes imagery of screaming drill instructors and lots of burpees. I had these experiences back-to-back, and while it was a startling juxtaposition, I now appreciate the synergy between these two programs as well as the important role the liberal arts play in the military profession.
On the surface, the environments of Officer Candidate School (OCS) and my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, could hardly be more different. OCS is a highly structured program in which every minute of a candidate’s day is pre-planned, and stress is a feature rather than a flaw of the training environment. Modern universities, however, are much more freewheeling. Actual attendance policies depend on the course instructor, and nearly everyone who attended college knows a classmate who made it semesters without seeing the inside of a classroom except for exam days. Indeed, some of the most formative activities for college students involve how they use unstructured idle time instead of formal training. And perhaps infamously, today’s universities take an opposite view of stress on students, seeking to eliminate stress when possible and provide ample resources to shelter students from too much of it.
Read the full article at the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
Nicholas J. Romanow 