The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Reverend Scarlett. Mr. LEAVITT. We have one present who possibly will not say anything but on the very first graduation he stood and took a picture of all the people who were then gathered 13 years ago, Loring Arnold. He has been here practically every graduation and has seen a lot of these things. I would be glad to have Loring make any suggestion he might wish. The CHAIRMAN. And I might add he is the dean of political writers in the State of Maine at the present time. STATEMENT OF LORING ARNOLD Mr. ARNOLD. I don't think I should say too much although I will say I think that this area is very fortunate in having such a high-type school as this academy. We hope, like many others, that it will continue and there will be some way of strengthening the structure. Thank you. The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Loring. I wonder, Ralph, if it would be possible to have Lieutenant Langlois give for the record some idea of the success the school has had in placing its graduates. Mr. LEAVITT. I think that would be a very fine thing for Lieutenant Langlois to do, but the time is such that if I am going to say anything I will have to say it now, because once he gets on there won't be anyone else. I have three things I would like to say. The CHAIRMAN. Very well, go ahead. STATEMENT OF RALPH A. LEAVITT Mr. LEAVITT. There is one very important thing about the Maritime Academies. They are located in places where there is a large reservoir of men who want to go to sea. Now the principle behind the Federal Academy when it was first established was that we would strengthen the merchant marine by bringing people from Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, and places where we didn't have State maritime academies. I am all in favor of getting people from those areas but if that principle would continue with relation to California, Massachusetts, and Maine, they would only have in the Federal system, under the actual quota system, Maine would have only 3 or 4. Actually Maine has a reservoir of 60 to 70 boys each year who want to be officers in the merchant marine but could not possibly get into the Federal system. In New York State they have a reservoir of officers there because New York is the greatest maritime city in the entire United States. They have there a reservoir of four or five hundred men that go to the State academy which they call their college and also 300 of the boys that are at Kings Point come from that area. Therefore, a school in New York State is very, very essential. If the Federal school, for instance, were in Florida or Mississippi or some other place, there would be 500 people who would like to go to sea from New York State but who most likely would never go down there to go to that school. The same thing with Massachusetts, only a small fraction of the boys from Massachusetts would go to Virginia to go to a maritime academy. So that is why it is so important to have a school here in Maine. I have referred to this in the questionnaire. Here we are a small State with less than a million people, and yet we have a school supplying as many officers as either Massachusetts or California because here are people who want to go to sea. Now, there should be another academy, in my mind, in Virginia because there there is another reservoir of men who don't go to school, who come up through the hawsepipe. You will find that 25 percent of them come out of Warwick County and there should be a school there to train them. They won't go up to New York but they would go to a school if the school were there in Virginia. That is the first point I want to make. The second, a question was asked about cargo handling, if we should give instruction in cargo handling. We do give instructions in the theory of cargo handling and stowage. We have a ship here and we show them how stowage should be handled. It would be impossible in any school to teach a boy for every port in the United States. We might teach a boy how to handle cargo as it is handled by the American Export Line, which would be of no value to him in the handling of cargo for the Barber Line or the Grace Line, or some other line where the problems were entirely different. So a person going to sea meets problems of that particular ship or that particular line and he is going to be green on all but 1 or 2 cargo-handling factors, regardless of what we teach him here. The third one is stabilization. Everybody here says we should know what the Federal Government is going to do if we possibly can. I understand it is like talking about when we get utopia. But we hope that this committee can come to some general idea of whether State maritime academies are to get anything or not. As soon as we know what the philosophy of the Federal Government is, then the board of trustees and the State of Maine and the personnel here can begin to make plans. At the present time we don't know what to do. We don't know whether to ask the State for twice as much money or whether to ask the boys for more tuition or whether to cut down on the program or build up the program. I do hope that when this committee gets through they can convince the Congress that they know what the situation is and what the policy of the Government should be. The CHAIRMAN. Of course, that is one of the main objectives of the study, to see if we can come up with a definite recommendative. to the Congress that we hope might be accepted as to how we can stabilize this whole situation financially. Mr. LEAVITT. And we know the amount of money coming through each year will have to depend on the views of Congress at that tine. But we should have some policy that this is a good thing to do, and not have somebody come along such as this last year and eliminate the funds for the academy. Although I was quite confident, through your help and others, that we would get the money back, you know there is a belief throughout the United States that if the President's budget doesn't include something it cannot be put in. Most people thought it was all over and there was no chance of getting any more. Mr. BOURBON. May I ask one question? What in times of natioà. emergency could be done to expand the facilities here? Mr. LEAVITT. We have another plant, a complete plant located in the State which could be taken over where we could land Mr. BOURBON. That is Fort McKinley? Mr. LEAVITT. On Great Diamond Island in Portland. That is complete. Mr. BOURBON. Is that owned by the State? Mr. LEAVITT. No; the Federal Government. I don't believe it will ever be used for an Army installation now. As they are now operating, they are working on divisional strength and they are not putting in training centers for 800 people. Mr. WEBSTER. I think with the same preface Mr. Bourbon just made I would like you to comment on the desirability of a 3-year course as compared with a 4-year course. I know that subject is well covered in the answers to the questionnaires but I think you have some views that would interest us. Mr. LEAVITT. I believe the aim of a school of this type is to train offieers for the merchant marine. If the Federal Government and the State of Maine are spending so much money because of the fact that they are interested in the merchant marine, I think when the boys graduate from the school they should go into the merchant marine. In other words, if a boy goes to the University of Maine, a liberal arts college, the end result there is to give the boy a good education and we don't care much where he goes. Except, of course, if he is an engineer we hope he will be an engineer, and if he goes into a woods-handling proposition, we hope he will be a forester, but this school here is a specialized school to train boys to go into the merchant marine. If you give him a training for 4 years so when he leaves here he feels that he now is a qualified engineer to go to the General Electric or to Westinghouse, or if on the other hand he decides he wants to go into the paper industry, as far as the people who are interested in the merchant marine are concerned he is a total loss. You have spent your money in vain. Granted you have an educated boy but you have not helped out what you started out to help. We believe, by the record we have here, that 99 percent of all our boys go into either the Navy or the merchant marine and most of them see merchant-marine service before they get through-that not perhaps because we know more but by a happy circumstance of the type of education we give here we are training boys who will go into the field which they trained for. I don't know how we arrived at that. I don't know whether the 3 years is the answer but we do know that by training 3 years and by training as we do that we are getting this result. Therefore we feel that we must have fallen into the right formula. Mr. WEBSTER. That is very helpful, I think. Mr. WEBSTER. Mr. Leavitt, the argument has been made that all of the academies and Kings Point should be geared to the number of officers that the industry will absorb in the immediate future. Now, parenthetically, the industry reports which have come into our committee in reply to our questionnaire state as a general rule that the industry can absorb about 1,500 new officers per year. 400 to 600 of them are now coming from all the academies. Do you believe that it is a sound fundamental principle for the Government, State or Federal, to think in terms of gearing the academy activity or size of its classes, and so forth, to the immediate need of the industry in the following 1 or 2 years? Mr. LEAVITT. I would say it would be utopian if you could do it but I don't believe there is anybody in the world who can tell you what the industry will be at the time we graduate a class we take in. Either there could be a depression, which we hope we will never have. which would decrease the number we would need; or we might go into a war or emergency, which we also hope we will never have, which would demand far more than we are graduating. I think the only thing we can do is to say we have 1,100 ships or 1,200 ships which we have under normal conditions, and we need but 1 officer per ship. Now, the 1,500 is the number of officers, new officers, which are given licenses each year. I cannot find out where the 1,500 are being ab sorbed although I am very sure that there are 1,200 or 1,300 being absorbed. We from the academies are producing only between four and five hundred or six hundred. I believe that with the electronics that are being put on ships, with everything that is happening to make the ship more of a machine shop than it ever was before, even up in the charting rooms and things of that sort, we have to train more and more men through these schools. Mr. WEBSTER. May I say because of the national defense aspects of maritime officer training it might be, might it not, dangerous to set up the standard in terms of immediate needs or economic needs of the shipping industry the following year? Mr. LEAVITT. That is right and so I believe that stability should be given to the schools by the Federal Government which will allow us not basing it so much on the number of men that we are taking into the school but on the amount of money that you will give. In other words, at the present time there is a certain fund from which these 710 boys can receive four-hundred-and-some-odd dollars per year. Now, instead of that, there should be-that amounts to $60,000-now instead of that there should be given to each school based on The CHAIRMAN. Is your arithmetic correct on that? Did you say 710 receive $400? Mr. LEAVITT. Yes. The $60,000 is what comes to us. The total amount is $280,000--the whole thing which comes to the academies at the present time on all grants is $660,000. Now there should be some way or other that the Federal Government appropriates $700,000 or $800,000 or whatever the case may be to encourage the schools ard that should be divided into the schools rather than to 710 boys or 201 boys or 500. Then the schools themselves will have the stability of knowing that they have so much Federal aid coming to them and es expand their schools just as far as they should normally go. If we knew here that we were always going to get certain Federal and. I believe we could put out in the catalog that we have certain Feders' aid and we will split $40,000 or $50,000 or $80,000 or whatever the case may be between the boys that are here, and that would give $350 $500 or something like that to each boy. Then we could go out and recruit and we would know just exactly what we were going to have within limits, I mean. If the school here grew to be 230 or 240 or ever up to 300, it woudln't make any difference to the Federal Government only you would have a bigger reserve and then it would be up to us to see if we could place them. If we trained beyond where we could place them, then it would drop off if people saw there were too many of them here. That is the way the legal schools operate and the medical schools operate. They take in the boys that apply. Mr. BOURBON. În other words, the old law of supply and demand? Mr. LEAVITT. Yes, and to my mind we may build up the schools so we will eventually be training eight or nine hundred of these boys that are necessary and if we get where we are training that number and they cannot be placed, then it will drop back to 600. But we should have State and Federal schools and the Federal Government should give the schools so much aid and then we could build up with the rest of it from the boys and we will know where we are going. The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Ralph. Lieutenant, would you care to step forward now and let us have the advantage of your experience in the placement of students? STATEMENT OF LT. EDWARD LANGLOIS Lieutenant LANGLOIS. I speak as director of placement. Any leading question you have or do you just want the picture? The CHAIRMAN. Why don't you go ahead and give us the picture? Lieutenant LANGLOIS. Well, in 1947 we organized the placement service of the academy realizing we are the youngest of the State schools and had to establish our reputation plus the fact that we are furthest away from the industry. We had to come in direct contact with them, so in 1947 I went to New York and spent a week visiting with the shipping people to meet them. They knew little about us and we knew less about them, and our first year didn't prove too fruitful due to the fact we went too high up instead of going down to the dock area and seeing the placement people. In 1949 we went down again and started to make some real concrete progress, meeting some people who were going to help us and did help us, and in 1949 when shipping was poor we were able to place a great many of the men. In 1950 we made more contacts and were able to place the entire class. That was true in 1951 and 1952 and 1953. Now when I say we were able to place the entire class I meant those who went directly into merchant service. You realize some will go into the Navy directly. Our records will show that not more than 5 or 6 from 1949 to 1953 didn't go to sea at all. One boy hurt his leg and he couldn't pass the physical after graduating and he didn't go. Several others never went to sea but they were very, very few. During 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1953 naturally shipping increased owing to the Korean crisis and we had no trouble at all. We were able to place the men without too much trouble from the unions. In 1954 we developed trouble, shipping fell off some and the unions got a little tougher. When I say "tougher," I will explain in this way, that the mates had to join the Master Mates and Pilots' Union. Now in order to get on their type of hiring list the way they conduct their hiring a mate must pay union dues and then go into Mr. WEBSTER. Approximately what were the union dues? There are fewer jobs aboard merchant ships for mates than engineers due to |