The West Point Class of 2020 stands ready to serve this nation

On Saturday, more than 1,000 members of the West Point Class of 2020 will graduate, with President Trump as their commencement speaker. The ceremony will conclude their 48 months at the United States Military Academy. The last few months at West Point have been an unorthodox time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but their preparation for the profession of arms is on par with more than 70,000 members of the Long Gray Line that preceded them.  

The U.S. military has continued to function in the shadow of the pandemic. Several things distinguish West Point from other institutions of higher education, given that its task is to not only graduate productive members of society but also build and deploy the next generation of U.S. Army officers. Doing so during a pandemic forced us to rewrite the playbook on how to teach and model leadership for our cadets.

West Point is the premier leadership-development institution in the world. Its specialized curriculum combines academic excellence, military fundamentals, physical endurance and character development into a single course of instruction for the purpose of cultivating leaders. Our graduates will be looked to by subordinates and trusted by superiors — all in the context of a cause greater than themselves, within months of graduation. 

This spring we remained duty bound to meet the challenge of readying our graduates for that which awaits them, while employing a methodology far removed from the one to which we are accustomed. Those who graduate on June 13 — and future classes at West Point — will be tested in their first jobs, not on their ability to recall academic tenets but on their ability to make decisions in the face of adversity. Graduating against the backdrop of a global pandemic has given these young men and women experience with confronting ambiguous situations and charting an intentional course toward mission accomplishment. 

At West Point, our military faculty brings real-life leadership experience into the classroom to couple with academic instruction. What we teach is predicated upon years of active military service, leading soldiers through activities that range from routine training to deployments abroad in theaters of conflict. 

The Army is in the “people business.” As a global force, people are our most potent asset. West Point emphasizes interpersonal relationships as an integral part of our curriculum, and it is why we mentor and foster developmental relationships with students that collectively result in the best achievements for the Army.  

In more typical times, our classroom role enabled us to survey the faces in front of us and to detect signals of distraction, even among high-performing cadets. Typically, these distractions emanated from their lives beyond the classroom and cued us to interact with those cadets on topics other than the academic subject at hand — to ask the questions that would elicit candid responses, and to help them to chart a path that enabled them to meet their challenges. That type of interaction is critical to the success of raising up the next generation of resilient military officers, who, in turn, will employ the same skills to build those under their command. 

The opportunity to do this was greatly compromised in an online environment; even though we shared ideas through video-conferencing, the social cues upon which we typically rely had disappeared.  Yet, even with such limitations, we fell back upon our academy’s mission statement: “To educate, train and inspire.” Leadership is often described as “providing purpose and direction,” but consistency, confidence, care and empathy are essential to that pursuit. We worked to instill those traits despite the limitations of online teaching. 

Thankfully, because of the eight-week period that preceded the move to online instruction, our faculty and cadets managed to establish the personal rapport needed through daily interactions in class, at athletics practices or in our homes. In the weeks since we last were together, we have found innovative ways to continue these relationships.

At West Point, cadets generally find themselves on an even playing field, but with remote coursework, many students were thrust into less-than-ideal home circumstances. We did not want to lose students to financial, familial or location-based challenges. It was essential to emphasize empathy to ensure that cadets did not break and ultimately thrived in their individual circumstances. After all, we need these young leaders, at their best, in service of our nation.

Great military leaders are not developed through rigor and regiment alone. After considering individual situations with leaders from across the academy, West Point granted its cadets greater latitude in deciding which courses to pursue and which to forgo. Though no virtual environment could substitute for the camaraderie we typically have with students, we remain impressed by the resilience, professionalism and determination of the cadets. The effectiveness of how West Point adapted to the pandemic was a result of their resilience.  

The challenges of the past several weeks will yield valuable lessons for our cadets. The academy’s focus on developing leaders for a lifetime of service and professional excellence — even in the midst of a global pandemic and, more recently, social unrest — is setting our graduates on a pathway toward noteworthy conduct and excellence. Through this experience, the graduating class will do much more than walk in our footsteps; they will carve out a course for themselves and for the advancement of America’s people, principles and objectives.  

The graduating class of 2020 will build upon the legacy of those who came before them. The American people can be assured that these graduates stand fully prepared for the task of service to our country.  

Zachary Landis and Nicholas Lewis are majors in the U.S. Army. Both served in Afghanistan, among other assignments. They are 2008 graduates of the United States Military Academy West Point and teach in its Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. Both are contributors to The MirYam Institute. The views expressed here are their own and do not reflect the position of the academy, the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense.