Army Counseling Program May Help Prevent Abuse
C.W. Post Trains West Point Officers to Handle
the Moral Dilemmas of Life and War

Brookville, N.Y. – The prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq has led to many questions: How could this happen, for example, and who should be held responsible? A West Point master’s degree program in counseling and leadership development, administered by the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, N.Y., asks another question: How can we prevent incidents like this in the future?

"This is a program that the modern-day Army has incorporated into its training program to better inform and care for the cadets under an officer’s command," says Robert Manheimer, Ed.D., Dean of the School of Education at C. W. Post. "Counseling expertise makes officers better commanders. They are better adjusted because they know themselves better."

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has been working diligently for more than 10 years with selected U.S. Army Captains who are emotionally healthy people with strong human relations skills. After completion of an M.S. degree in counseling, they become Tactical Officers with the Corps of Cadets. The current program began in 1993, when West Point decided to offer a graduate counseling program for tactical officers under the auspices of a university. The C. W. Post Campus and its School of Education Department of Counseling and Development, which had operated an evening counseling program for civilians and interested military personnel at the Academy for the past 20 years, was selected to administer the program.

Tactical Officers – known as "TACs" for short – oversee the Academy’s cadet companies, which are each made up of about 125 men and women. Far from simply teaching cadets to fight wars, TACs play a vital role in cadets’ academic, military, physical, moral and ethical development. The TACs follow the U.S. Military Academy’s code of conduct as well as the ethical guidelines of the American Counseling Association.

In order to prepare future TAC’s for this challenge, the 51-credit M.S. in Counseling and Leader Development delves into topics including death, depression, stress and career choices. Tactical Officers in training learn that it is more important to help their cadets develop a healthy mentality and effective coping mechanisms than it is for their company to be number one.

"When officers develop expertise in counseling, they come to know themselves and other human beings better, and can therefore develop and practice excellent moral standards," says Manheimer. "They also develop a better understanding of what their actions are all about – and can pass that understanding along to the men and women they command."

For more information about the C.W. Post Master’s Degree in Counseling at West Point, call Dr. Scott McGowan, chairman of the C.W. Post Department of Counseling and Development, at 516 299-2814.