President Bush has nominated a career submarine commander with a reputation for valuing diversity to be the next Naval Academy superintendent.
Rear Adm. Jeffrey L. Fowler, whose appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, would replace Vice Adm. Rodney P. Rempt, who rankled alumni as he sought aggressively to make the school more accepting of women.
Rempt is expected to complete his four-year term as superintendent in the coming months.
Friends and classmates said Fowler, an avid hunter from North Dakota, would be well-suited to follow Rempt, praising his commitment to diversity in the Navy and his handling of difficult sexual assault problems while leading the Navy's recruiting command in Millington, Tenn.
"As things go wrong, as they sometimes do in the Navy family, the human side of him comes right out," said Master Chief Petty Officer Evelyn Banks, a senior enlisted adviser to Fowler in Tennessee. "He never failed to put the sailor first and would never make decisions about people's lives without considering the multiple consequences they could have."
Fowler, reached last night in Italy, where he is stationed, said he could not comment before his nomination was approved by the Senate.
An academy spokesman declined to comment about the nomination, which was announced with little fanfare Friday afternoon by the Defense Department.
A lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Fowler has the sort of international background that the Naval Academy values in the training of its students. He has deployed to the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans, as well as the Arabian Gulf, and commanded a squadron of fast-attack, nuclear-powered subs.
Fowler has been in Naples, Italy, since July, working as the deputy director of the U.S. 6th Fleet in Europe and commander of allied submarine forces on the Mediterranean.
As superintendent, he will face a community of outspoken alumni, some of whom have harshly criticized Rempt, accusing him of being overzealous in the charges he brought against former Navy football quarterback Lamar S. Owens.
"A lot of alumni would like to see an effort to get back to the basics," said John Howland, a 1964 academy graduate who distributes news and manages a blog for a network of more than 500 alumni. "A lot of us see this past few years as being a pretty rough time for a whole bunch of reasons. I think a lot of alumni are really anxious to see a pretty sharp change in direction."
