Stepping up its bid to recruit minorities, the U.S. Naval Academy on Friday unveiled a 60-second promotional spot featuring Asian, Hispanic and black midshipmen and said it is producing a graphic novel to appeal to young recruits.
Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, who has been Naval Academy superintendent for just more than a year, said one of his priorities is to increase the numbers of minorities at the Annapolis institution, as well as reaching out to students from such historically under-represented regions as the Upper Plains and West Coast.
This year’s plebe class at the academy, which entered Annapolis on Thursday, has 351 minorities in a class of about 1,250 — a record high. But Fowler, at a news conference Friday, said the military’s officer corps should reflect the makeup of its enlisted force, which is about 47 percent minority.
To that end, the academy is sending recruiters into inner-city high schools with a technical focus and accepting more minorities into its weeklong summer program for rising high school seniors. Half of the 83 blacks in this year’s plebe class attended the Summer Seminar program.
“It’s an important part of getting over the fear of the unknown and the uncertainty of military service,” Fowler said.
The academy has jettisoned its traditional promotional video, which featured standard shots of the Annapolis campus with a stern, authoritative male voice-over. The new video produced this year features the Naval Academy Gospel Choir and images of minority midshipmen flying jets and serving on ships. The video will be shown during the institutional commercial time during Navy football games and in other venues.
The graphic novel won’t be released until the fall, but Fowler said it begins with a scene at the tomb of John Paul Jones, a Revolutionary War naval hero whose crypt is on the academy grounds.
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