The charitable arm of the United Services Automobile Association, the Texas-based Fortune 500 company that offers financial services to military families, has given $2 million to endow a faculty chair in ethics at the Naval Academy, the academy's foundation announced yesterday.
The gift, one of the largest received by the foundation, creates the Robert T. Herres Distinguished Military Professor in Leadership and Ethics chair, named after the 1954 academy alumnus and recently retired chairman and chief executive officer of USAA.
The endowment will allow the military college to lure prominent faculty at higher salaries than it could afford with public dollars.
"Excellent faculty attract excellent students, which produce excellent naval officers," George P. Watt Jr., president of the Naval Academy Foundation, said yesterday in a statement.
The chair - essentially a new, privately funded faculty slot - will oversee the main ethics course for sophomores, "Ethics and Moral Reasoning for the Naval Officer."
Its first holder is William "Rick" Rubel, a retired captain who last directed the college's department of engineering and weapons. The academy foundation would not disclose Rubel's salary.
Barbara B. Gentry, president of the USAA Foundation, said the school's leaders urged the company to endow a position in ethics, a subject that moved center stage in the curriculum after a string of crime and cheating scandals in the 1990s.
"That was one of the areas of highest priority for the academy and the superintendent," Gentry said yesterday from the foundation's offices in San Antonio. "This was one they really wanted to fill at the earliest possible opportunity."
Herres, 70, who retired as USAA chairman in October, had served as vice chairman of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff and led the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the U.S. Space Command. Though an Annapolis graduate, he spent 36 years in the Air Force, retiring as a general.
The Naval Academy Foundation, the college's private fund-raising group, is in the middle of a campaign to raise $175 million by the end of 2005.
The USAA gift lifts the total so far to $132 million.