The Naval Postgraduate School is a graduate school operated by the
United States Navy. Located in Monterey,
California, it grants primarily master's degrees plus some doctoral degrees to its students, who are mostly active duty officers from U.S. and foreign
military services.
Its campus was once a resort hotel; some of its buildings and its cactus garden date from that time.
History
On June 9, 1909, Secretary of the Navy George von L.
Meyer signed General Order No. 27, establishing a school of marine engineering
at Annapolis, Maryland.
On October 31, 1912, Meyer signed Navy General Order No.
233, which renamed the school the Postgraduate Department of the United States Naval Academy. The order established
courses of study in ordnance and gunnery, electrical
engineering, radio telegraphy, naval
construction, and civil engineering as well as continuing the original program
in marine engineering.
During World War II, Fleet Admiral
Ernest King, chief of naval operations and commander-in-chief of both the Atlantic and
Pacific fleets, established a commission to review the role of graduate education in the Navy. In 1945, Congress passed legislation to make the school a fully-accredited, degree-granting graduate institution. Two years later, Congress adopted
legislation authorizing the purchase of an independent campus for the school.
A post-war review team, which had examined 25 sites nationwide, had recommended the old Hotel Del Monte in Monterey as a new
home for the Postgraduate School. Negotiations with the Del Monte Properties Company led to the purchase of the hotel and 627
acres (2.5 km²) of surrounding land for $2.13 million.
In December 1951, the Postgraduate School moved across the nation, establishing its current campus in Monterey.
Today, the school has over 40 programs of study including engineering, physical sciences, space science, computer science, operations research, business,
international relations, and other disciplines, all with an emphasis on military applications. It is home to the Center for
Information Systems Security Studies and Research (CISR)
and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS).
CISR is America's foremost center for defense-related research and education in Information Assurance (IA), Inherently
Trustworthy Systems (ITC), and defensive information warfare; and CHDS provides the first homeland security master’s degree in
the United States.
Future
In the summer of 2005, the School was placed on a list of possible base closures by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission along with the Defense Language Institute (DLI). Suggestions were made to combine NPS with the
Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) and possibly move NPS to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Another idea considered was to
combine NPS with DLI and leave them in the Monterey Bay area.
On August 25, 2005, the BRAC commission voted unanimously to
keep NPS and DLI in Monterey, and to keep them separate. Under the terms set by the commission, the Navy will relinquish control
of the Postgraduate School's classes and research projects to an oversight board (made up of a combination of representatives
from the school and civilian educators), which will report to the Secretary
of Defense. The plan is intended to cut costs by giving the school more authority to make changes to the curriculum and
minimize duplication between NPS and AFIT in the aerospace engineering
community of practice.
See also
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
