To the extent that one believes or cares about such designations, I attended a “Top 20” National Private University. This plaque represents what I believe the be the most valuable bit of education I received from that august institution. It is never far from my mind and despite the growing distance from those years, I think about it more and more. Here’s the full quote from former Dean of Students of said university, Madison Sarratt (1888-1978):
“Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in trigonometry and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both, but if you must fail one, let it be trigonometry, for there are many good men in this world who cannot pass an examination in trigonometry, but there are no good men in the world who cannot pass an examination in honesty.”
This quote and the penetrating idea behind it is worth teaching to one’s children from the jump in kindergarten.
The quote put another way demands an answer to these questions, are you a person focused on principle or outcomes? Do virtuous means for obtaining desired ends matter or do the ends justify whatever the means? Do you want to be seen as having passed the examination (at any cost) or do you want to be a good person?
For his part Sarratt wants both outcomes for his students [for us], “I hope you will pass them both.” With proper, disciplined preparation the choice is a false one. Yet without such foresight and forehandedness, there will be a choice to be made. There will be a cost if one has not prepared in such a way that there is no choice at all in the moment of crises and stress.
“Discipline equals Freedom” as the wise man says. If one has the discipline — a sense of proper, orderly conduct and action — one will have the freedom from choosing between passing the “math” test or passing the honesty test. Both will be possible.
Sure one can get the piece of paper that says you got the desired grade and ultimately says you got the education, but at what cost? $150K or one’s integrity? (beware one swear word in the video)
36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
Mk 8:36
At that university I gained my commission as a Navy officer and ultimately became a surface warfare officer (SWO) - a “ship driver.” Uniting all the distinct communities in the Navy — SWOs, pilots, submariners, SEALs, SEABEEs, etc — are the Navy’s Core Values: HONOR, COURAGE, and COMMITMENT. Honor and honesty are related. The quote about honesty serves as the foundation of my alma mater’s Honor Code. One cannot have honor without honesty. They are inseparable. It is a high bar no doubt; no one can live it perfectly, but the difficulty in its attainment is no excuse. The aspiration and the relentless attempt to adhere to such a standard is the thing. The instruction Sarratt provided in choosing honesty over x (mathematical variable representing the “trigonometry” of the moment), was quite valuable to my thinking about one of the mainstays of life on warships — maintenance.
All that equipment has to work the way it ought to or it is simply excess baggage. Busted equipment won’t help in battle. If your gear won’t work, it it’s no good to anybody. - ADM Arleigh Burke
There is a saying in the military, the Army and Marine Corps equip the man, the Navy mans the equipment. Weapons and other equipment are issued for the men and women of the ground pounding forces to operate. Especially in the surface fleet, the officers, chiefs, and sailors operate from inside the equipment e.g., all hands man your battle stations. The ship IS the weapon and is operators live, work, and in some cases die in the ship. There are thousands of maintenance actions required to keep a ship operating at-sea, preparing for deployment or on deployment ready “to conduct prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea.” There are reams and reams of paperwork (now mostly if not all electronic) that attest to sailors’ qualifications to performance maintenance on every bit of that equipment and to the fact that they performed each maintenance action completely and correctly and reported all out of specification conditions (aka it ain’t doing what it is supposed to do) to their supervisors. To do otherwise is to be guilty of gun decking
In the modern Navy falsifying reports, records and the like is often referred to as "gundecking." The origin of the term is somewhat obscure, but at the risk of gundecking, here are two plausible explanations for its modern usage.
The deck below the upper deck on British sailing ships-of-war was called the gundeck although it carried no guns. This false deck may have been constructed to deceive enemies as to the amount of armament carried, thus the gundeck was a falsification.
A more plausible explanation may stem from shortcuts taken by early midshipmen when doing their navigation lessons. Each mid was supposed to take sun lines at noon and star sights at night and then go below to the gundeck, work out their calculations and show them to the navigator.
Certain of these young men, however, had a special formula for getting the correct answers. They would note the noon or last position on the quarterdeck traverse board and determine the approximate current position by dead reckoning plotting. Armed with this information, they proceeded to the gundeck to "gundeck" their navigation homework by simply working backwards from the dead reckoning position.
“Today I am going to give you two examinations, one in maintenance accomplishment and one in honesty. I hope you will pass them both, but if you must fail one, let it be maintenance accomplishment, for there are many good sailors in this world who cannot complete their maintenance, but there are no good sailors in the world who gundeck.”
Before you come to the wrong conclusion, try one’s darnedest to prepare properly with discipline to get one’s maintenance done, because shipmates’ lives depend on equipment operating correctly and when needed. However, if one cannot or did not, the Navy’s Core Values absolutely demand one’s honor to tell the truth of the matter, courage to withstand the consequences for not having done so, and the commitment to such high standards of behavior come what may. The cynical who read this start to conjure any number of scenarios that start with “But.” So noted.
Think about all the scenarios in which one would shift one’s allegiances upon learning the people of [favorite] organization are more concerned with seeming to have “passed the examination” than having truly, honestly having passed it. The hospital technician who said he autoclaved the surgical instruments but did not. Think about all the ways in which someone in one’s life gave the appearance of doing the honorable thing but did another, dishonorable thing. Now think about the subsequent lost one’s trust and how damaging that was to the relationship, commercial or personal.
…but there are no good men in the world who cannot pass an examination in honesty.
So what?
I suppose one take-away is the recognition is some of the least obvious lessons in life end up being the most valuable and long-lasting. I failed in a few things in my time in the Navy, but that Sarratt quote helped shape me as an officer and forced me to think about what my signature meant, what my word meant, and the cost of gundecking, not just the potential failed mission or loss of life, but also to the culture in a close-knit ship. Later, I learned to apply it to non-professional areas of my life more rigorously. Even beginning to say “I did not make time” instead of “I didn’t have time” to do something I had committed to do. Ultimately, it became another tap of The Shepherd’s Crook which brought me to faith in Jesus Christ. His perfect obedience his perfect resistance to self-serving decisions is the standard by which man should measure himself. A ruler cannot measure itself properly. There must be something outside it that defines is purpose and proper function.
May I propose another perhaps more esoteric take-away? Chief among the capabilities, what its various equipments can do, of a ship is its weapons. Those weapons go a long way to define the ships character. A Ford-class aircraft carrier has a different character than an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer than a Virginia-class submarine than a Littoral Combat Ship than an Iowa-class battleship. Whatever the differences of in the details of their characters, the admirals who rely on them to accomplish various missions. Hypothetically, in the cases where ships’ crews gun decked various maintenance over time, those ships convey the appearance of having “passed the examination” and are therefore ready for prompt and sustained combat. Invariable when those ships’ weapons systems begin to fail, in a manner of speaking, admirals call into question the ship’s character in at least one major sense, can I rely on that ship to contribute to and accomplish the mission? To paraphrase ADM Burke, “a destroyer which cannot actually destroy is no good to anybody.
Analogously, it is our moral character which determines whether we are worth of trust by others or not. If we do not maintain our honesty, our honor, but give the impression of having passed various examinations: marital fidelity, fiduciary ethics, friendship, etc., we are literally not [doing] good to anybody.
Each and everyday, perhaps moment to moment, we are given two examinations. I hope we pass them both, but if we must fail one….
James 5:12
12 But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
One would hope all people of good character would feel impelled to meet such a high standard. Ultimately, it occurred to me that without a standard outside myself, I could always rationalize a decision to gundeck aka fail the test in honesty. How could I attempt to prevent this so as not to prevent from doing good for my family, my community. As I was coming to faith, I recognized I needed to submit to a higher authority in ways that I had learned through a quarter century of Navy service. Now that is not the reason I follow Him now, but it is that recognition of that need that helped me recognize my thoroughgoing need for Him for everything.