Some call the United States Naval Academy a “leadership laboratory.” The Academy exists to make naval officers, forming them “morally, mentally and physically” to exemplify “duty, honor and loyalty.” While most of the midshipmen accepted to the Academy have received a fair dose of moral fiber from parents, teachers, and mentors along the way, the institution promises to take these lessons a step further. It accomplishes this by increasing the burden of leadership and raising the bar for personal and professional integrity.

At the epicenter of this leadership laboratory stands a building dedicated to Stephen Bleeker Luce, an American hero. Luce was a midshipman in 1848. He graduated and went to sea, later returning to the Academy to become commandant in 1865. He focused his efforts on educating men in the art of gunnery, seamanship, strategy, and most important, leadership. Today, Luce Hall overlooks the Navy’s sailing marina, with its sailboats named for various midshipman virtues, such as courageous, fearless, dauntless, and so on. In front of this building stands a statue of Admiral James Stockdale in a fighter pilot uniform, honoring his service as senior officer while a POW during the Vietnam War. He later received the Medal of Honor for his leadership.

Classes in Luce Hall include ethics, navigation, strategy and weapons, and naval law. The curriculum incorporates case studies from real-world scenarios, discussion forums with junior officers, lectures by respected world leaders, ethics roundtables, and hours of homework. As with any laboratory, some of the experiments at Luce produced unintended results. Heightened idealism about one’s ability to affect change as a junior officer may be a consequence of time spent in Luce Hall and the cause of some disenchantment. There are some things, however, especially pertaining to leadership, that can only be learned in the school of hard knocks. The Naval Academy was certainly that at times, but then again, it was called a leadership laboratory for a reason. As the first class graduating post-9/11, we stepped into a military requiring more advanced ethical leadership skills than the Naval Academy had had time to teach us.