History going to school in Annapolis

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Annapolis is a college town in love with history. Now history is coming to Annapolis in the form of a Middle East peace conference, offering students a close encounter with world events.

Though it's unlikely the 4,400 students at the U.S. Naval Academy will get a firsthand glimpse Tuesday of the talks on campus, the midshipmen surely will pay attention, said Glenn E. Campbell, an academy graduate and vice president of the Historic Annapolis Foundation.

"There is a tremendous amount of interest among the faculty and the students of international diplomacy and peace efforts," Campbell said.

Political science is the No. 1 major among midshipmen, according to the school's public affairs office.

Campbell said holding a peace summit at a place where future Navy and Marine officers learn to wage war is not as odd as it may seem. The Naval Academy's tight security and proximity to Washington, about 30 miles away, make it a natural location for diplomatic efforts, he said.

The academy has played host to NATO meetings and academic diplomacy summits. In 1999, Azerbaijan President Heydar Aliyev visited the campus and dined with midshipmen, Campbell said.

The campus will be closed Monday and Tuesday to general visitors, but classes will meet, spokeswoman Deborah Goode said. She said some classes probably will monitor news coverage of the conference, but she wouldn't say how else the summit might affect campus life, including the Army-Navy Week pranks that traditionally precede the Army-Navy football game to be played Dec. 1 in nearby Baltimore.

Army, which has been known to kidnap Navy's billy goat mascot, gave no hint of a truce.

"Clearly, the cadets at West Point will take the increased security measures into consideration during that week," said U.S. Military Academy spokesman Frank DeMaro in West Point, N.Y.

The Naval Academy's traditional pregame pep rally will be held Wednesday night as planned, Goode said.

Just down the street from the Naval Academy stands private St. John's College, a liberal arts school with a curriculum based on the "great books" of the Western Hemisphere. Spokeswoman Rosemary Harty said St. John's classes won't follow the peace summit because students there learn about politics by reading and discussing the classics.

"They're reading Thucydides, they're reading Aristotle," Harty said. "They know about politics from something Aristotle would write on politics, not from something written by any contemporary politician."

But sophomore Daniel Lewkow sees the peace conference as a chance to expose his 450 cloistered colleagues to the outside world through coverage in Epoch, a quarterly, current-events magazine he helped found. The magazine was seeking press credentials to cover the summit, he said.

"There's not really much of a knowledge about political events at St. John's," said Lewkow, of Richmond, Va. "I feel that it's almost a duty of mine to educate people on the news of the world."

Senior Elizabeth Burlington, editor of the campus-focused newspaper, The Gadfly, said she had heard little about the summit and wasn't planning to cover it.

"It's not that people don't care ― it's just that we're so caught up in things that happened 200 years ago or 2,000 years ago that it's hard to focus as a community on this one thing. Honestly, sometimes we just forget there's this outside world, especially during essay-writing periods," she said.