A Leap of Faith: MMA Trolls for Training Ship Money

I had a really strong opinion piece all set for last week’s MarEx e-newsletter, but as you probably noticed, I pulled it at the 11th hour on Thursday afternoon. My initial effort centered around my incredulity over news reports that the RADM Richard Gurnon, President of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy (MMA), was reportedly in Washington, D.C., lobbying the Massachusetts Congressional delegation for as much as $12 million in additional funds for the school's training ship. On Thursday afternoon -- and just as we were getting ready to pull the e-news trigger -- Rick Gurnon got back to me and found 30 minutes to explain to me where the school is headed and why and how that will impact our future ability to produce qualified mariners. I’m glad I waited.

The money, if appropriated, will go towards upgrading the T/S Enterprise so that it can accommodate as many as 90 extra students and 20 faculty and staff. The goal is to make room for a total of 600 students and 120 staff on board the 540-foot ship. Last week, I did the quick math in my head and wondered aloud why the school that, according to its own statistics, produced just 94 license-track graduates last year and only projects about 142 licensed mariners when the largest freshman class in history completes its training (in four years), could possibly need any more space on the training ship. It turns out they do.

With U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) riding point on the effort, there’s a reasonable chance that the effort will yield some joy for the 117-year-old academy. And, while I admit to not having checked where the former presidential hopeful’s political weathervane is pointing this week, I’m guessing he’d be more than happy to divert some war funding into the effort to train the Commonwealth’s maritime cadets. No doubt Ted Kennedy will show some love too and the whole thing will come together.

A recent article published by the Cape Cod Times quotes Richard Gurnon as saying that “more cadets are being left at the dock when Enterprise sets sail in January and February each year.” With the academy’s enrollment swelling by more than 25 percent in recent years to a whopping 1,107 students, that’s not surprising. With only about 650 of those students in a license track curriculum, the important statistic is not how many are being left behind -- but which ones. But, if we are leaving license-track cadets on the pier -- and Gurnon says that they are -- then perhaps the upgrade is warranted.

As much as I am fond of my alma mater, I had to question the wisdom of spending a large chunk of taxpayer money to upgrade a platform that may already be plenty big for what it is intended for. In 1980, Mass. Maritime cranked out 175 licensed graduates with a total class representing just 75 percent of today’s numbers. No doubt that in that environment, today’s Enterprise would be too small. But that was then; this is now.

Today’s engineering cadet at Mass. Maritime is just as likely to end up running the power plant at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro as he or she would be to answer "bells" on a tanker in the port of Houston. I even saw a job come across my computer last week for a position (and I am not making this up) to run the physical plant at the Dallas Cowboys new facility in Texas. Now, these are pretty cool jobs -- especially at this time of year -- but I don’t know what any of that has to do with training ship funds. And, as far as I am concerned, those students only interested in shoreside job opportunities can get their training fiddling with the boiler simulator on campus or adjusting the blades of the academy’s space-age wind turbine.

The past twelve months have been pretty good ones for those who would aspire to be merchant marine officers. The U.S. Maritime Administration and its able administrator, Sean Connaughton, has engineered more than a few deals to get U.S. cadets onto a myriad of different kinds of ships for the purposes of training and obtaining the sea time necessary for Coast Guard licensing requirements. In theory then, the pressure for additional berths on the training ship(s) should be lessening, not getting worse. Rick Gurnon, however, says that nothing could be further from the truth. When an entire class of engineers had to be left behind this year because of space constraints on the training ship, the scramble to find them berths on commercial platforms was anything but easy. Glitzy cadet berths on foreign-flag LNG ships may be coming, but they are apparently not here yet.

The real story at Mass. Maritime today involves more than the raw numbers. And because MMA’s president has changed how and when cadets go to sea, the dynamics of its training has also changed. For example, MMA now schedules training cruises during the winter months and those seagoing stints have been shortened to 50 days from the 60-day trips that were the staple for decades. Gurnon says flatly, “I would never go back to a summer cruise.” The moves make a lot sense. A ship that is absent during the worst of the New England winter months endures less wear and tear and the ten fewer days of annual at-sea time saves the Academy countless dollars in operational and bunker fuel expenses.

But training cruises that involve fewer total days also require all four classes participating on board, every year. And it is here where Gurnon hopes to eventually produce measurable gains in how many cadets choose seagoing careers. Here’s how it works: The freshman class finishes its first semester at MMA and then, instead of waiting until the summer after completing that first academic year, all of them go to sea in January. Gurnon calls it “applied learning.” And this year alone, that has meant putting on board more than 300 first-year cadets, of which about 160 will probably never go to sea for a living.

Gurnon is right. Putting kids on board the ship who haven’t yet declared a major is a smart thing to do. It is also a calculated risk. He knows that it is difficult to know whether someone is cut out for shipboard life before they’ve even experienced a day away from the dock. MMA’s president also believes that the numbers of graduates choosing the license-track option will increase because of it.

To be fair, the “MMA way” does not yet demonstrate any remarkable differences between the numbers being produced at Mass. Maritime and the other state schools. Someday, that’s going to have to change. But if the Gurnon way of training merchant mariners sounds eerily like the newly introduced “vocational” programs at the union and trade schools, then that’s probably a good thing.

All of this brings us full circle back to the plea for the funds to upgrade the training ship. As a point of accuracy, Gurnon politely corrected me when I referred to this planned retrofit as an “upgrade.” Instead, he says, “The funds we require will only complete what was originally planned and promised. We simply did not have the money to finish the job the first time.” He also rejected the idea that two training ships, rather than four or five, shared amongst all of the academies, is the way to go. Some have suggested that fewer vessels, utilized in rotation, might accommodate as many as four training cruises in a single calendar year -- with plenty of time left over for planned maintenance and/or down time.

It is Gurnon’s firm belief that each academy has to have its own training vessel and ideally, these platforms should be “built for purpose” vessels. He insists, “This is an issue of national security. We need mariners for sealift service during times of war.” He may be right on all of that, but he and all the other academy presidents are going to have to get in line for that funding. At a point where the economy could be headed for a recession and the will to adequately fund the Title XI programs is absent, there are but two chances that a standard, custom training vessel will be built -- slim and none.

The annual training cruise is underway at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. That’s not earthshaking news for most of us, but for human resource executives at ocean shipping companies, the disclosure that 495 merchant marine cadets have begun the annual ritual that will eventually grind out a healthy chunk of the seafarers we’ll need down the road is probably a good thing. At America’s other five maritime academies, the same thing will occur at one time or another during this calendar year. King’s Point cadets are typically assigned to commercial platforms. It is also a fact that the cumulative effect of all of that training is not producing enough skilled mariners to meet today’s industry demands. In fact, the collective product of all of the state sponsored maritime academies shows a 61 percent (mariner license) yield for all of the students who eventually receive diplomas.

I hope that Congress appropriates the full amount that MMA has in mind. It is no secret that the maritime academies, in general, have had to evolve over the past two decades in order to survive. That has meant, in some cases, a wholesale upheaval of the curriculum to the point where some of these fine schools are clearly headed in another direction. It is difficult to argue with the success that Richard Gurnon has helped to engineer up in Buzzard’s Bay. Maybe MMA would be a satellite campus of UMass Dartmouth had he not been around. But, let’s not lose sight of the reason the school was founded in the first place, back in 1891.

I haven’t always agreed with how RADM Rick Gurnon runs Mass. Maritime, but I also think that he may be on the right track to reversing the declining trend of licensed graduates from his school. I hope so. It is way past time to put the “maritime” back into the maritime academies, or at least make provisions to ensure that it actually stays that way. A system of training that depends so heavily on a federal assistance program should have to demonstrate that it is actually providing return on investment on a nationwide scale. It’s a modest goal. And in this case, if we build the berths, they will come. - MarEx

Joseph Keefe is the Managing Editor of The Maritime Executive. He is also a licensed mariner and a 1980 (Deck) graduate of the oldest continuously operating maritime academy in America. You can reach him with comments on this, or any other article in this e-newsletter, at [email protected].