Vice Adm. Richard J. Naughton has plunged into his official duties as the new Naval Academy superintendent, quizzing top administrators about everything from fund raising to the minutiae of the academy's summer training programs.
School officials said yesterday that since his Senate confirmation Friday, the veteran aviator has wasted no time delving into the nitty-gritty of running the 157-year-old military college.
"We get the impression that it will be difficult to overwhelm him with detail," academy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Spann said yesterday. "He likes detail. He likes statistics."
The crash course continues this week in Brussels, Belgium, where Naughton is sopping up knowledge at a conference of service academy superintendents from the United States and Europe.
Naughton, a naval flight officer whose previous assignment was commanding a base in Nevada that trains elite pilots, was nominated by President Bush last month as the academy's 57th superintendent. The Senate confirmed him without debate about 12:40 a.m. Friday, promoting him in the process from the two-star rank of rear admiral to the three-star rank of vice admiral.
"The Naval Academy has a phenomenal faculty and staff, dedicated and talented midshipmen and is on track for continued success," Naughton said in a statement. "I look forward to leading this great institution into the future as we produce leaders for the nation."
He could not be reached for further comment yesterday.
Naughton succeeds Vice Adm. John R. Ryan, who formally retired, after 35 years in uniform, at a change-of-command ceremony Friday.
In his four years at the academy's helm, Ryan won praise for mending frayed relations with the faculty, boosting applications, renovating historic school buildings and drumming up support for the academy's first private fund-raising organization.
Ryan and his family are moving out of the superintendent's residence this week and heading for Throggs Neck, N.Y., where he will become president of the State University of New York Maritime College.
In the meantime, Naughton, 55, a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who graduated from the academy in 1968, has been staying with his wife, Jacqueline, at the academy's bachelor officers quarters. The impression left on the academy brass he has conferred with in recent days is of a sharp-witted tactician who is "extremely pleasant, extremely competent and very energetic," Spann said.
That appraisal squares with those of Naughton's friends and former colleagues, who describe him as a quiet but exacting leader who believes in balancing hard work with a social life and a respectable game of golf.
"He's not a stick in the mud," his friend Thomas P. Naydan, an Annapolis building contractor, said in an interview last month.
Naughton has said little publicly about his plans for the academy, other than expressing his intention to build on Ryan's legacy.
In past assignments, colleagues say, he has moved quickly to make sweeping changes in programs he felt needed reform. After just a few months as commander of the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center in Nevada, for instance, he pushed through a plan to streamline the oversight of 11 Navy weapons schools.