Academy supe wants to end Herndon Climb - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Academy supe wants to end Herndon Climb

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Naval Academy’s outgoing superintendent took aim Wednesday at the decades-old tradition in which midshipmen struggle to climb a campus monument, citing the risk for injuries and his belief that new team-based training is a better way for plebes to finish their first year at Annapolis.

Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler said he wasn’t canceling the annual climb of the Herndon Monument, scheduled for May 24, nor would he predict when it might go away, but said he wants the “focus” for plebes to be the intensive training called “sea trials,” which he said give a better team-work experience for students.

If successive classes of midshipmen apply the kind of “operational risk management” to the Herndon climb that they learn to use as officers in the fleet, “they’ll probably abolish it on their own,” Fowler said. “We’re trying to get our young people to make wise decisions here.”

He discussed his take on the ritual in a meeting with reporters to review the preceding year in Annapolis.

By tradition, each year’s class of plebes must work together to climb a 21-foot-tall granite obelisk smeared with lard and grab a white “Dixie cup” hat on its peak. The students scramble atop each other to retrieve the cover and replace it with an officer-style cover. Upperclassmen harass the plebes as they grapple with the monument, spraying them with hoses.

The event usually takes about two hours, although it took as long as four hours in 1995, when mischievous upperclassmen fixed the Dixie cup to the monument with “the strongest glues and tapes they could find,” according to an official history released Wednesday with Fowler’s remarks. When the ordeal is over, the freshmen have symbolically finished their arduous first year at the academy; later that week, the seniors graduate and accept their commissions in the Navy or Marine Corps.

Every year, several midshipmen are hurt in the event, Fowler said, one reason he thinks it should be phased out. In 2008, four midshipmen were hurt so badly they had to be taken away in ambulances, said Naval Academy spokesman Cmdr. Joe Carpenter.

Because Fowler’s tenure as superintendent ends this summer, it isn’t clear whether the tradition will actually stop. Although Fowler said he has heard second-hand reports that mids don’t like the climb, the mids themselves have little power to actually end the tradition.

As of today, every plebe on the Yard is required to at least attend the Herndon Climb, Carpenter said, although they are not necessarily required to help their colleagues scramble up the shaft. According to legend, the midshipman who swaps the covers atop the monument is the first one in the class to become an admiral, although that has never actually happened.

If the Herndon climb goes away, Fowler said, he hopes the monument and its part of the Yard go back to being a “gathering place” for mids and visitors. According the academy history, the appeal of the monument began when it was a part of a path on the Yard, dubbed “Lover’s Lane,” where mids strolled with their dates — but barred to plebes. In fact, plebes were forbidden to date altogether.

After graduation in 1907, when that year’s plebes became sophomores — known by tradition as “youngsters” — they “swooped out to swarm around the Herndon Monument, cheering everyone and everything on what they called ‘the day we rated youngsters,’” according to the history.

The Herndon Monument has figured in academy year-end traditions ever since, although plebes did not begin to climb it until 1940. Grease on the monument made its debut in 1952.

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