One of the perennial tensions in Professional Military Education (PME) is the role of civilian faculty at DOD learning institutions. Although all PME institutions employ civilians to teach, the specific part they play varies widely across colleges. While our own Naval War College employs a considerable number of civilians, some NWC teaching departments have few, and there is a spectrum of “types” within the general category of “civilian professors.”
This issue was highlighted in a recent exchange on Best Defense about the Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth. Professor Nicholas Murray’s commentary revealed how CGSC’s schedule is configured to the detriment of learning, and does not meet the real-world standards of any respected graduate-level academic program. Murray is a civilian academic with a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, and it’s clear that his op-ed rankled some feathers in Kansas.
A response came quickly from Steve Boylan, a retired Army officer who serves on the CGSC faculty, who maintained that the institution is doing a good deal better than Prof. Murray had portrayed. While asserting that CGSC is getting along fine — everything being “fine” is a common PME refrain — Boylan made an odd assertion. He stated that the institution — which, after all, bills itself as a college — isn’t really like civilian graduate schools, and perhaps should not be compared to them, as Prof. Murray had done.