Proud tradition still maintined at maritime academy: MMA’s Different Course> Regiment membership no longer only draw to Castine school

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CASTINE — Mike Brimmer oversees 400 people and manages a 16,000-ton ship. A senior at Maine Maritime Academy and aspiring engineer, he figures the leadership experience will look pretty good on his resume.

When he came to the academy three years ago — after a year at Southern Maine Technical College because he was rejected by MMA the first time he applied — Brimmer was quiet, shied away from involvement in campus activities and certainly wouldn’t have dreamed of giving speeches or orders.

Now he does both while commanding the respect — and salutes — of his khaki-clad peers who, last year, chose the 22-year-old from Portland to command the academy’s regiment of midshipmen.

“The regiment has helped me a lot,” Brimmer said while walking through the Castine campus recently. Not only has the regiment brought out and refined his management skills, it will help him land a job.

“It’s a heck of a stepping stone,” he said. “It really sets you ahead of the pack.”

The regiment, which combines military-style discipline with leadership training to fulfill Coast Guard requirements for working on ships, has long been the heart of MMA, one of seven federally-funded maritime academies in the United States. And like the academy itself, that heart has been revamped to remain relevant in a world that demands education as well as discipline.

The new regiment

The biggest change is that membership in the regiment, the traditional entree into shipping jobs, is no longer required of all students at MMA. To boost its lagging enrollment a decade ago, the academy, under the leadership of former governor and 1952 MMA graduate Ken Curtis, decided to add new majors, such as ocean studies, small vessel operations and marina management, that do not require membership in the regiment.

Almost all of the increase in students — from 421 in 1987 to 622 this year — has come in non-regimental areas. In its heydey, the regiment numbered about 500 members, but has decreased to 400 or less in the past few years.

At the same time, the new courses have profoundly increased the number of women on campus. In 1987, there were 14 women enrolled at MMA. That number has increased steadily over the last decade and there are now 79 women students. There are also a few minority and nontraditional students, further reflecting the sweeping changes that have affected higher education in the past decades.

While boosting enrollment, the new courses have also made for a better educational atmosphere, according to Sue Loomis, chair of the school’s humanities department. She said the changes have made the academy “a richer community.” Although humanities courses, which cover writing, history, philosophy and art, have long been required of all students at MMA, Loomis said classroom discussions are more interesting when students with diverse perspectives are brought together.

“The changes have been right on the mark,” said Loomis, who has been at MMA for 18 years. “They were necessary, imminent and fortuitous.”

One student who came to MMA because of its new curriclum is Yolanda Carrasquillo, a senior ocean studies major from Yarmouth, Mass., who hopes to go on to graduate school to study how shark cartilage retards the spread of cancer. She came to MMA because the school offered a hands-on approach to marine science with its large fleet of boats and proximity to the ocean.

She said she liked the fact that students at MMA learned to operate research vessels, not just travel on them to conduct experiments. She has traveled on two extended cruises and worked with the Department of Marine Resources on a salmon study.

“The hands-on aspect is great,” Carrasquillo said. “It’s so much better than book learning.”

Nonregimental students like Carrasquillo now make up about a third of the academy’s student body. Some say they would like that to increase to half, while others say the ratio is right as it is now.

While the number of nonregimental students on the Castine campus has increased, so too has the number of students who have voluntarily chosen to be in the regiment, which requires them to go through a special training program and wear uniforms on campus. (Students in the school’s engineering and marine transportation programs, which lead to an unlimited U.S. Merchant Marine license that allows graduates to work on any size ship, must belong to the regiment. Students in other programs may elect to join the regiment.)

Volunteers double

In the past three years, the number of people who have chosen to be in the regiment has nearly doubled from 14 in 1995 to 26 this academic year.

Aimee Stites, a junior small vessel operations major from Bridgeport, Conn., joined the regiment during her sophomore year at MMA. A spunky woman with a penchant for bright-colored lipstick, Stites said she joined the regiment for the discipline it required. The first day, she was quickly reduced to tears and planned to drop out but the person she needed to give her resignation to was not in his office. She stuck with it and now talks animatedly about the benefits of the regiment, where she is now a training officer.

“If it were not for the regiment, I would never make it to an 8 o’clock class,” she said with a smile.

Now she’s up shortly after dawn every morning to join in the daily flag raising ceremony. As do all midshipmen, she takes a turn, sometimes in the middle of the night, standing watch on the State of Maine, the academy’s training vessel. After graduation, Stites, who is one of 20 women in the regiment, plans to join the Coast Guard and aspires to be the first woman to serve on the guard’s motorized life boats. She plans to ruffle some feathers because women are now barred from serving on the 44-foot boats that right themselves after capsizing.

Stites takes great pride in her appearance and bearing, and along with some other members of the regiment, is upset that not all her peers at MMA do the same. On a walk through the campus’ large dormitory, Stites proudly points out how the regimental portion, which is cleaned daily by freshmen in the regiment, is cleaner than the other sections where nonregimental students live.

“We resent that they’re taking over our school,” she said of her nonregimental counterparts.

“They’re slackers,” she said as she straightened her hat, or cover, over her auburn hair and cast a disapproving glance at students wearing blue jeans and baggy shirts.

While such feelings may not be widespread, there is not a lot of interaction between the two groups of students. For example, regimental students tend to eat together in the dining hall while nonregimental students sit at other tables.

But, Carrasquillo insists, all students, regardless of their major, work together. “Some of my best friends are in the regiment,” she said. “I have 600 big brothers and 69 little and big sisters.”

Kinder, gentler regiment

For those who do choose to be in the regiment, that experience has been modernized, too. No longer do “strikers,” now renamed midshipman training officers, yell obscenities at their charges or demand that they drop to the ground and do push-ups for minor offenses. While there may still be some yelling, commanding officers are expected to counsel fledgling midshipmen to help them learn what is expected of them.

Freshmen or sophomores who join the regiment spend the first six weeks of school as “midshipmen under guidance,” or MUGs. They wear blue chambray shirts with their last name stenciled across the chest and dark blue pants, making them look a lot like prisoners. They must travel in groups or, if going alone, run to their destination. They are not allowed to have televisions or stereos in their dorm rooms, which are subject to inspection at any time. The theory is that the MUGs will learn to manage their time and to work as a team.

“We’re teaching these kids to be good managers, to be good leaders, with a sense of ethics and morals,” said Capt. Vince Corry, the commandant of the midshipman, who came to the academy after retiring from the Navy.

Or as Wally Wrigley, a 54-year-old member of the regiment, put it: when you graduate from MMA you’re ready to be fourth in command of a very expensive ship so you had better know what you’re doing.

Employers are eager to hire students with these skills, and MMA has long placed more than 90 percent of its graduates in jobs, often with hefty salaries. Many graduates do go on to work for shipping companies while others work for power plants, paper mills and other land-based industries. The current word on campus is to refuse any job that pays less than $40,000 a year.

Because of its success, Corry and others believe the regiment will always be an integral part of the academy.

“If it stays relevant to the demands of society, yes, there will continue to be a regiment,” Corry said. “It had better be here for the future of the academy.”

Remaining relevant to the changing needs of society and employers, which have expanded far beyond the shipping industry, has been a key to MMA’s success.

The academy was founded in 1941 to train sailors for the merchant marine. The academy expanded rapidly during World War II to meet the need for naval officers.

The institution remained a small, military-driven school until the mid-1960s, when Edward Rodgers, a retired Navy admiral, took over the school’s superintendency. At that time, midshipmen lived on the school’s training ship, there was no library on campus, most faculty members were MMA graduates, and its academic programs, which covered only three years of study, were not accredited.

Then, as the number of jobs on the high seas began to decline after the Vietnam War, school officials knew the academy needed to broaden its horizons. Hence the new majors and de-emphasis on militaristic hazing in the mid-1980s. Meeting societal demands has been a bit more of a challenge.

Women at MMA

While MMA has come a long way since it was the first maritime or military academy in the country to admit women in the mid-1970s, there are still few women on campus and fewer still in the regiment.

Although academy officials were facing increasing pressure to admit women, they were not ready to make that change when Deborah Doane Dempsey landed on their doorstep in 1973. Armed with a bachelor’s degree and a husky voice, Dempsey convinced then superintendent Adm. Rodgers that she was the right candidate to be MMA’s first woman. Rodgers recalled that he admitted her to the academy after a 15-minute conversation in his office.

Dempsey completed the four-year program in just two and a half years and graduated at the top of her 105-member class in 1976. She went on the become the first women to obtain her second mate’s and chief mate’s licenses and, in the mid-1980s, she became the first American woman to qualify as a master mariner. She was the only woman to earn the U.S. Navy’s Meritorious Public Service Award, for delivering tanks and other combat vehicles to U.S. troops during the Persian Gulf War.

Although Dempsey set a stellar example for future women at MMA, and the number of female students has steadily increased since her departure, female students still make up less than 15 percent of the student body. Only in recent years has the academy enrolled enough women to field sports teams and women’s groups are stilled eyed with suspicion by some.

In a recent show of force, a reborn Task Force on Women successfully lobbied for more lights and security calls boxes on campus. Like on other college campuses, there are still occasional complaints of sexual harrasment and even a rare case of assault.

In addition, the number of women in the regiment still remains small but the number of freshman women joining the regiment has doubled in the last three years, from five in 1995 to 10 in the current academic years.

“Although we think of ourselves as officers and gentlemen, we aren’t always,” said Commandant of Midshipmen Corry. “It’s still tough being a girl at MMA, but it’s better than it’s been.”

While the transition from a strictly maritime training school to a better rounded college has had its bumps, the changes do seem to be working. Gone are the dark days of a decade ago, when the beating death of a midshipman on a Portugese island during the academy’s annual training cruise, the at-sea suicide of a former woman cadet who charged she was mistreated by academcy officials, and a series of charges of sexual harrasment and abuse hung over the campus like dark clouds.

“I really do think the place has turned the corner,” former president Curtis said in a recent interview.

As further evidence, a program added to the school’s curriculum this fall had already won acclaim from the governor and business community. A new major in international business and logistics, which was expected to enroll 10 students but garnered 27, won the 1997 Maine Innovator of the Year award from the Maine International Trade Center. Potential students from as far away as Europe and Canada are asking for more information about the unique program that is not offered at any other school in the country. Companies in Maine and other states have already expressed interest in hiring students who complete the program, which was funded solely through a private donation.

“We want to be trendsetters,” said N.”Shashi” Shashikumar, chair of the international business and logistics program. “We can’t rest on our laurels.”

According to President Len Tyler, the academy has hit its stride of late. “We’re where we want to be,” he said. “We’re in pretty good shape.”

He said there are no plans to add new programs in the next few years but the academy will continue to work to attract new students. The goal is to enroll 200 additional students by the year 2000.

Reports from employers bolster Tyler’s claims. Many MMA students say they were directed to the academy by alumni who said the Castine school is the best maritime academy in the country.

“I came to MMA because it’s the best,” said Scott Coleman, a freshman from Seattle.