Return of The EE 304s

Second chance at West Point

They are lowly sergeants, the bottom rank for most seniors at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Yet they seemed delighted to be wearing their dull gold sergeants' chevrons on their gray dress uniforms, and to be lining up on the plain overlooking the Hudson River with the rest of the 4,479-member corps of cadets as classes resumed last week. They are 98 cadets who were expelled from the Point a year ago in the biggest cheating scandal in its 175-year history.

Originally scheduled to graduate last June, the 98 make up 10% of the class of 1978. But in many ways they may always be in a class by themselves. They have been nicknamed the EE 304 cadets after the electrical-engineering course whose take-home examination was the focus of most of the charges. If the academy had followed tradition, none of the expelled cadets could have returned, for they had violated the rigid honor code: "A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do." It was only after an agonizing inquiry into the moral fabric of the academy that the Army ruled that any of the 152 cadets who had been kicked out in the scandal could apply for readmission. The 98 who returned included five expelled in other cheating incidents.

Like many of his EE 304 colleagues, reported TIME's Barbara Dolan, Cadet Kenneth Curley saw his re-entry as both a new beginning and an end to humiliation. Curley, 22, was ranked seventh in leadership in his old class. He observes sardonically that he "would have been a real big shot" at the academy had he not become involved in the scandal. During his year in purgatory, spent back home in West Islip, N.Y., working as a kitchen helper and steeplejack, his parents got calls from anonymous taunters who would jeer, "I hear your son's a cheat." After all that, the Point seems like paradise. "I requested to go to my old company," he says, "and they've been great to me."

Other EE 304 cadets seem warier about their return. One student said grimly: "There are only 273, no 272 days to graduation. We can make it." Added another: "It took guts to come back, but it took just as much guts not to return."

One cadet who might have been expected to show more resentment than most is Timothy Ringgold, 24, expelled not for cheating but for saying that he knew of cases of unreported cribbing. Recalls Ringgold: "When I left, I threw away all my uniforms. I was sick of the academy." After he lost a federal court suit charging that the honor code was unconstitutional, he "floundered a lot" until he entered Arizona State University last spring. Then Eastern Air Lines Chairman Frank Borman, the former astronaut and old West Pointer ('50) who headed the commission that probed the scandal, wrote encouraging him to go back. "I knew I wouldn't be at peace with myself until I finished," says Ringgold.

Not all West Pointers have welcomed the EE 304 cadets. Their return, Cadet Mark Wroth complained in a letter last June to the campus paper, "is a blot on the academy, regardless of our personal opinions." Some faculty members agree. The former West Point commandant of cadets, Brigadier General Walter F. Ulmer Jr., was reassigned last year when he opposed any leniency. Says one major: "We've lost credibility with cadets and we've lowered our standards."

The academy has changed since the scandal. That summer, it enrolled its first women plebes--and now has 177 female cadets. The academy has done away with the system by which cadets rate each other on leadership. It has also abandoned the general order of merit, which prescribed the ranking of each cadet by academic grades as well. Thus the class of '78 will be the first to have no "goat"--the cadet who got his diploma last because he had the lowest overall standing.

The honor code has survived unscathed, but dismissal for code violations is no longer mandatory; the academy superintendent may now keep a student in cases where dismissal seems too draconian. The EE 304 cadets thus return to the Point to find some major reforms that they themselves unwittingly set off.

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