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[PROF BRENNAN]

[A superb report! Comprehensive
and informative. Please route
to Department Chairmen.]

29 January 1980
From: Professor Joseph G. Brennan
To: RADM Edward F. Welch, Jr., USN
President, Naval War College [2-1-80]
Via: Dean of Academics (COPY PROVIDED TO PROF CROWL)

Subj: Elective 101, FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL OBLIGATION; Report on

One of my specified duties is to make a report on the
subject course to be delivered to the President 15 January
1980. The report is set out below and covers the period from
the initial planning of the course to the present.

1. History of the Course

The origins of EL-101 lie deep in certain crucial
experiences of VADM James B. Stockdale, USN (Ret.), former
President of the Naval War College, now President of the
Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina.

These experiences include Admiral Stockdale's encounter
with academic philosophy at Stanford University in the years
1960-62 when he was assigned to graduate study there by the
Navy. This academic experience, including the important
contact with Professor Philip Rhinelander of the Stanford Philosophy
Department and his reading of Epictetus's ENCHIRIDION is
described in Admiral Stockdale's letter of 24 November 1975
(Appendix A).

A second and determining source of EL-101 was the seven
and a half years experience of Admiral Stockdale as a prisoner
of war in Hanoi after his plane had been shot down over North
Vietnam in September 1965. This experience is described in
Appendix A as well as in the Stockdale article "The World of
Epictetus" (Atlantic Monthly, April 1978), the latter required
reading for the course since it was first offered at the Naval
War College in the Fall of 1978.

Although we corresponded over a two-year period, Admiral
Stockdale and I did not meet until the change of command at the
Naval War College in October 1977, when Stockdale assumed the
Presidency. At that time and later in December 1977 the possibility
of organizing and team-teaching an elective course in
moral philosophy at the Naval War College was discussed. I was
then engaged by contract dated 1 February to act as Consultant
to the President, Naval War College, to organize and later to
teach with the President a course to be called "Foundations of
Moral Obligation," to be first offered as an elective in the
Fall trimester of 1978.

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