Charles Larson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Learning, Experience, and Education

In looking at your distinguished career, which includes experience as a naval aviator and as a nuclear sub commander, which are two very impressive bodies of experience for one man to have, what sorts of things did you learn from those experiences that helped make you a better commander down the road?

I think as an aviator it's early responsibility. You're in charge of that airplane. You have to fly, you have to do your mission, you have to do it with precision. I was the only person in the airplane, I was in a single-seat attack aircraft, so everything I did was very visible and I had to stand up and be accountable. If I was good everybody knew it, if I was not good everybody knew it. And I really enjoyed that challenge.

The nuclear submarine brought in the aspects of both technology and teamwork. Motivating good people, bright people, people that probably in many cases were as intelligent or more intelligent than I was. I had the opportunity to go to the Naval Academy and these people didn't, that was the basic difference. To mold those people together as a team and to take that beautiful, technical marvel, the nuclear submarine, and operate it out there on the high seas; it gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

In your experience there's a lot of thinking and practice on education. As I mentioned in the introduction, you were head of the Naval Academy twice, and you just told me that you are on the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland and are involved in a lot of the thinking there about how to reconceptualize institutions of higher education. So let's talk a little about your thoughts on education. First, can you teach leadership?

I think the ultimate way to teach leadership is by example. But you can certainly teach the basic precepts. You can teach about communication, about treating people, about working with people, about caring and sharing. So there are a lot of basic tenets and you can give a lot of examples of good strong leaders and why they were successful. But ultimately, in any organization, the people will be motivated if they see the people at the top living by the example, and living what they talk. Talk the talk and walk the walk, and I think that's probably the most dynamic thing. If they can see can see people setting an example that they want to aspire to, it will motivate them. So you can teach it but you have to live it, and it's the combination of the two that make it successful. If you don't live it then the people will think there's a certain hypocrisy in what you teach.

In your career -- you graduated in '58 and served until the end of the century -- a lot has changed in technology, and the soldier has had to adapt to this new technology. Share with us your reflections on how in the military and also in the private sector we need to work at making students able to deal with the amazing changes in technology that are occurring.

That's one of the things that we're doing in our University of Maryland where I'm the vice chairman of the Board of Regents. We have thirteen public universities in our system, and we, the Regents, are now establishing for the first time this year minimum graduation standards for our students in information technology. We feel that it's very important in the current world that our people be [computer] literate, regardless of their major, regardless of their profession, that they have the basic skills that they need to get out there and use technology to their advantage.

At the Naval Academy, I was very fortunate in my first tour between 1983 and 1986 to put in a major program to bring in computers to all students, to wire the entire Academy, to educate and provide technology to the faculty, so that we could use technology in our courses of instruction. And it's really wonderful to see the foreign language interactive videos, in history classes the incorporation of technology rather than the blackboard or charts, using technology and computers to show examples in history. So I think we need to keep pace and make sure that our young people go out there very computer literate. One of the challenges that I found, and I think this is one of the keys to our success, is that some of us old folks may not be that conversant. I wasn't at the time I put the program in. I hired someone who was, and gave him my faith that he would help me do it right. We spent the whole first year at the Academy and all of our resources educating the faculty.

This is when you were ...

When I was superintendent, yes. My feeling was that the faculty needed to start at a higher level than the students if we were going to have total integration. If the students come in literate and the faculty is resistant you will never incorporate technology. And that worked very well. We ended up with a very computer literate faculty and they started then bringing the students into this and incorporating it through our entire curriculum.

As a person who's had his hands both on non-military educational institutions and military ones, compare them in their capacity to adapt to changes like this. Is there a difference in terms of adapting to new technologies?

I think there's a little advantage, or at least I would consider with my background, a little advantage in a service academy because you do have more of an ability to make change more rapidly. At the Naval Academy over 50% of our faculty is civilian Ph.D.s, and we have the same faculty promotion and tenure system and structure that you would have with any university, including the University of California, Berkeley. And that's one of our strengths. We have that good educational foundation.

On the other hand, we do have more of an opportunity to adapt quickly to change and incorporate things a little faster than I think you might at a civilian university, with a little more of a bureaucracy and things like that. That's why I was able to do a couple of things there I'm very proud of. I was able to, within one year, put in a required ethics course and restructure our whole leadership, ethics, and character development program during my second tour. And it's how I was able to put technology in very rapidly during my first tour. So I think we can shift a little faster to the changes in the world. That's one of our purposes, to respond to the needs of the naval service, and we're structured to do that.

The military has been very successful in bringing education to a diversity of Americans, in some ways being the most integrated of our large institutions. How do you account for that success?

I think the fact that we live together in close quarters and we have teamwork and a camaraderie, that we tend to be goal oriented, team oriented, and work together as individuals, really makes you colorblind and gender-blind, if you will. Because you're more concerned about the person: what type of person is this? Are they contributing to the team? As we work together, it puts us on the forefront of both racial and gender integration. [With] the opportunities that have been provided in the military, you can go as far as you can go based on your ability, not based on your wealth or your background or anything else, but on your pure ability and how well you do your job.

During your career there have been such enormous social changes. You graduated before the sixties, then the sixties hit us all. And then the end of the Cold War. Is it harder to recruit and keep military personnel in the midst of all of these changes? And how has the military services dealt with that issue?

Well, let me give you first of all a little profile, Harry, of my class. My class had one African American, zero women and six Hispanics, although we didn't count Hispanics in those days. Nobody said we had six Hispanics.Twenty years later we went back [for a reunion] and realized we had six Hispanics. So we were a very middle class, male-dominated class. And then we've gone through all of the changes in society. I don't think it's any harder today to maintain and retain good people than it was in my day. In fact, I think our service is richer today because it is more reflective of society, and our officer leadership is more reflective of the make-up of society. I think that's a very healthy thing. I think the biggest thing you compete with, quite frankly, is the economy. It probably has more of an impact than the world or the social turmoil.

For people coming out of inner-city schools, the military must be fairly attractive because of what you offer with regard to technical skills?

Absolutely. And you know, there's nothing that gave me greater satisfaction than to see some of our young people, many of them minorities, who had a high school education that was really not up to some of the best schools in the country, to have them come and bring them up, increase their educational base, increase their capabilities, and then send them out into our Navy, but also out into society, as well-educated, well-informed citizens who will contribute. I will say that we're very proud of the fact that our graduates that get out of the Navy and don't make it a career are very active members of their communities and of society, and they're successful in a wide variety of professions out there.

Next page: Tour of Duty

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