Sears: [00:00:00] This is Radio Stockdale. We're talking about honor, and right now we're talking with Captain Rick Rubel, the United States Navy, Retired. Captain Rubel, you are one of the officers who really did a lot of the early work in developing the remediation program around the honor system here at the Naval Academy.

Rubel: [00:00:30] That's correct, Mike. About 10, 15 years ago, the Superintendent then developed this program of remediation and asked me to do the training and put together the content for this for this program when it was first launched.

Sears: [00:00:43] What is honor remediation?

Rubel: [00:00:45] The essence of it is it's a chance to help these midshipmen learn from their mistakes. Before the program, as you probably know, we pretty much separated almost all of the offenders that tripped the honor wire like cheating or stealing. And we came up with the idea that let's help them learn from the mistakes. If this is a developmental institution, which is what our mission statement says, the performance should help them learn from those mistakes instead of just separating them. Make this offense, if you will, part of their development. So that's in a nutshell, that's what remediation is, is a chance to learn from what you did.

Sears: [00:01:20] Ok, so let me ask the elephant in the room, is this a second chance program?

Rubel: [00:01:24] It can be a second chance program, but that's a policy issue, and I've talked to every commandant for the last 12 years. This has to be a developmental program, and it has to have, to have some teeth. And it frankly has to have a little deterrence, a little fear of getting caught. And if everybody had a second chance, then I'm afraid the teeth of the program would go away. So, I see my part of this is to make it the best program I can. Once we once they're assigned remediation, I train the mentors. We have something like fifty-nine mentors trained right now. I train mentors to try to make sure that they are as effective as they can in helping them learn from their mistakes.

Sears: [00:02:00] So let me ask you to kind of step through the steps along the way in the program. What is the remediation program and what happens once a midshipman enters that program?

Rubel: [00:02:11] Yeah, the commandant will assign a mentor. In the case of honor, it's in 05 or 06 for conduct. We've gone lower, but for honor, it's an 05 and 06 and it's directed counseling is what it is. It's very intense counseling. You meet once a week, you assign journals during each night you assign readings. It's very directed and it's very focused. It's very intense. After an hour mediation session, I'm exhausted and I'm sure my Mid is exhausted. But what it is basically Mike is it's a three-part program. Again, like I said, meeting once a week in the first part is what I call the why questions. What did you do and why did you do it? And did you know what's wrong? And those aren't simple questions. I mean, I asked initially when I first arrived, what did you do? And I asked it intentionally, vaguely, because I want them to state their offense and the way they state their offense has a lot to do with how they see their offense. If I had one that said, I just had a little trouble with a quiz and I said, wait a minute, stop right there, little trouble with the quiz. What are you telling me? You've trivialized it? You know, that's not what I meant, sir. Yeah, it is. I want them to say in their opening statement, I cheated or I lied. I use the C word, use the L word. I mean, so it's important that they be direct and honest about what they did. But then the question is, why did you do it? And that's actually a hard question, because it turns out we do things all day long. We make decisions all day long. We rarely think about what did I do that? We just go on to the next one. So, asking a young person to explain why they did something, that actually takes a while, you have to have to work with them to get them to really state it in clear terms. And in my case, moral terms, why did you make that decision? And then the hardest question of all under the why questions is if you knew it was wrong, then why did you do it? And that takes sometimes these mids four or five weeks to answer that question, because that's a very complex question. It has to do with both the moral decision side and the character side. In other words, they knew it was wrong. They knew it was wrong cognitively to cheat. But they did it, maybe because of their character. They didn't have enough honesty. They didn't have enough patience and enough courage. One of those virtues kind of let them down. So, so that's the why stuff. The other part of this program is the self-assessment, and this is the idea like, let's help you understand yourself. Let's help you understand your character and your personality and use the Myers Briggs because that's about strengths and weaknesses. And we also use your aptitude for commissioning the comments made by their company mates, and we go through all this to help them understand themselves. And at the end of this phase, hopefully they understand their strengths and weaknesses because in order to improve, you need to understand yourself. So, we spent all the time with self-understanding, and then the third part of it is self-improvement. What are you actually going to do to improve? What are you actually going to, give me some actionable things that you can do to become better. It's easy to sit around and talk to some captain about this and that. But what we actually going to do to become better? Give me an action list of things that you can actually track day to day that you're going to do from now on. And I've had some really good results on that. I've had people come out with 15, 20, 21 things that they can actually do, that they can, at the end of the day, they can before they go to bed, they can say, I did that, I didn't do that one. So that's kind of what the program is about. It's about understanding the why, self-assessment, and self-improvement.

Sears: [00:05:35] So I want to get to the keys to success in a second, but let's keep on going through this process. They are adjudicated to have violated the honor concept. Commandant makes a decision to send them into remediation. They end up talking to an O5 or O6 for six months plus on a weekly basis, and they have to write logs on almost a daily basis. What happens at the end of that six months? If it's successful.

Rubel: [00:06:00] If it's successful, we write a letter to the Commandant. They have to write a five- or six-page letter to the Commandant. Explain to them why they should be retained because basically they've been given a second chance. And then we, as a mentors, write a cover letter to that, to the commandant, explain how it went in, recommending passing satisfactorily or not. I've done sixty-one of these in my 16 years here, and I've only had four failures. And those are failures that didn't take it seriously. They just didn't. They just didn't take it seriously. The others did really, really well. But here's what I've learned in all these years of doing remediation. It has to be voluntary. I mean, I don't think I can make someone a better person if they don't want to be. I've just had very little success in helping someone become a more moral person, a better character if they didn't want to go along for the ride. Maybe I'm just not good enough. Maybe I don't know how to do it, but I've never been able to motivate someone to be better that didn't want to be. If they want to be, there's a whole lot we can do for them. But those that don't really want to be we unfortunately we had to separate those because they didn't pass remediation.

Sears: [00:07:03] Let me ask you a hard question how many have you seen come back into the system for a second violation?

Rubel: [00:07:08] Yeah, that's a great question. And this is a tough one for me because I've had two out of my sixty-one that committed a second offense, and I feel that that's on me. Maybe I didn't do well enough to remediate them, but one of them, I predicted. And this gets back to your previous question about what are we looking for here? One of them, at the end of the last session, I said, this is a wrap up session. And he turned to me and said, I'm good to go, sir. I got it. And he gave me a thumbs up and I said, no, you don’t, it was just, I'm good to go. I got I said, no, you don't. You don't got anything. This is not the end of a process is at the beginning of a process. He was so willing to tell me that he got it and he was ready, good to go. Then I kept saying, no you don't. The fact that you think you're good to go means you're not. And he committed another offense about six months later. So, I've had two that recidivized as I said, and I just felt really, I felt like that was on me. But I don't know how to interpret that. Two out of sixty-two is that good or bad? I don't know.

Sears: [00:08:01] You said you wanted to talk a little bit more about this concept of a second chance. What have you seen that would suggest that it's not a second chance program from the decision making and policy side of the spectrum?

Rubel: [00:08:14] Yeah, I have seen over the years and this change is by Commandant and changes by Superintendent. But I've seen over the years that for some offenses, they do kick people out. It's not about how maybe we separate, but I do believe, as I said earlier, there has to be some deterrence. There has to be some fear. I think, Mike, when you and I went through here, there was fear. I was afraid to death of the Honor Concept because there was no second chance. I remember some Firstie inspecting my shoes and, “you shining shoes today, Rubel?”. No, sir, I was, I was afraid to lie. Now is that good or bad? I mean, I told the truth after four years of practicing the truth, that got pretty easy. But was that real honor? I don't know. I think I was honorable when I got to the fleet. But was it because of the fear or was it because of the Honor Concept? I don't know which. But my point, I guess, is that we, it needs a certain amount of teeth. It needs to have a little bit of deterrence. If I can put it this way, please. It just gets to it. How does this fit into overall to the to this culture of integrity? You know, in the big picture, I think that this Honor Program is a piece of the what I call a culture of integrity. But what does that even mean? Culture, integrity? I mean, a perfect organization where we trust each other ,or if I ask you a question, I know, get a truthful answer, where I ask you to do something, I know it's going to get done. It probably doesn't exist as an ideal organization, but it's probably worth thinking about and figuring out if that's the ideal. Where are we and how do we get there, that gap analysis? So, I guess my point I'm trying to make. I don't mean to take too long here, but I think there's three things you need to get to that culture of integrity. The first one is you've got to have the training, you got to have, people have to know what the rules are. And we do that pretty well. Here we we train to the Honor Concept. The second panel of this three-way thing, if you will, is we have to have deterrence. There has to be some fear that if I do that, I'm going to get punished, I'm not going to do that. In the third panel of this culture of integrity thing, is there has to be development. And that's what we've been talking about so far. I think there has to be a chance for Mids to learn from their mistake. This is the moral development. This is a character development. And as I said, I've had some great successes and I've had some, some mids that came out of this program saying, this is the best thing that ever happened to me. I said, No, it's not. Yes, sir, it is. I wish I'd had this before. We didn't. We can't have that development too, but I think you need all three of those you have to have. You have to have the training, which is the “what”, you have to have the punishment, which is the “what not”, what not to do. And then you also have to have the “why”, that third panel, that development, that's the why. All those questions I gave you earlier were the why questions, why did you do it? Why is it wrong? What did you learn? So, I think without the why you don't get that buy in if they understand the reason for it, the why, they're more likely to buy it on their own, they're more, more likely to get it wrong without that punishment hanging over their head, if that makes sense.

Sears: [00:10:59] It makes a lot of sense, you know, you mentioned the coaching program, I think this is a very exciting new part of life in the Brigade. Can you talk a little bit about the Honor Coaching program that you and others are developing?

Rubel: [00:11:11] Yeah, Last spring, I was asked to talk to each of the battalion 2nd class about the Honor Remediation program. And I was talking to the First Battalion and after my session, it was actually on Zoom because we were all in our rooms, after talking to the first battalion, one of the mids came up to me and said, so, why don't we have a program where we do, we help to mentor the mids before they trip the honor wire? And I said, What a great idea. Let's do it. Now we have this about 10 years ago, we tried it for a couple of months. But when we paired off a mid with an officer and we did this coaching for a couple of months and went okay, but the problem was there was no there was no there was no structure, there was no content. I said, Let's, let's just do this program. Let's put together a program and I'll do the coach. I'll do the training and I'll put together the content. So, I came up with like a 30-page brief of content. And I trained all the trainers and we paired off the fifty-one officers with fifty-one second class midshipmen. And it ends next week and it's gone extremely well. And with the content, the comments we're getting from both sides is, wow, why didn't we do this before? I'm learning so much from this officer. I'm learning about the fleet. I'm learning about myself. And it really can go in any direction you want. I mean, I've guided my Midshipman second class to think about certain things about herself. But at the same time, she's asking me a question about the fleet, which I think I can help her with. I had two commands. So, this is just a great program and we hope to institute it. The mids are running it and I'm just doing the training for the for the content, but the mids are running itand running it extremely well.

Sears: [00:12:41] You know, that's a great program. It's not you're not targeting mids who have violated the concept. You're talking, you're targeting mids who are midshipmen going through daily life. We talked earlier with Commander Vavaseur that, you know, this is a practiced thing, honor and being honorable is Aristotelian. It's practiced. And if we can give more time and information to the midshipmen, I think that's a positive and that's what you're doing in the coaching program.

Rubel: [00:13:12] Jana and I've talked before about how do we get to what she calls the left of the problem? How do we get to these mids before they commit an honor offense? And this is the idea of this coaching thing. And honestly, I've had in the remediation side, I've had maybe a dozen mids at the end of this say, boy, I wish I had this before I committed my offense. And you know, I take that with a grain of salt, but I think they mean it. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get this to them before they commit an offense. The problem is we can only do maybe 100 at a time. So, we're going to try to get next semester and maybe we can get up 100 officers and 100 midshipmen. I know some officers said they could take more than one. So, we're only doing one or two at a time out of forty three hundred. But it's a start. It's better than nothing. And I think it's got some real promise.

Sears: [00:13:55] Professor Rubel, thank you for talking to us about the Honor Concept, especially about the Remediation program. Thanks for joining us.

Rubel: [00:14:02] Thank you, sir.

Sears: [00:14:10] You've been listening to Radio Stockdale, a series of podcasts produced by the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. You can hear more podcasts at stockdalecenter.com\podcasts.