Articles by Andy Simpson, KP '82

Update:  At today’s court hearing, the parties reached an agreement that will allow the senior midshipmen on the soccer team to participate in graduation and […]

Dear Secretary Chao: We at KingsPointSentry.com welcomed your nomination as the Secretary of Transportation and we were particularly heartened during your confirmation hearing when Senator […]

In two weeks, B-Splits at the Academy are scheduled to depart on sea year. Unfortunately, 90% of the Class of 2020 B-Splits will be getting […]

Owen Doherty, ’81, an Associate Administrator at MARAD, reached out to me today to provide data on how MARAD calculates the percentage of restoration of […]

Spoiler alert:  Because my source’s data was accurate. Two weeks ago, in a deliberately provocative post entitled  “84% of all MARAD employees who testify before […]

Two days ago, we revealed the true statistics about the restoration of sea year. They were bleak — and not nearly as rosy as the […]

There’s an old saying that figures don’t lie but liars can figure. MARAD is doing a lot of figuring when it comes to calculating the […]

[Updated with a direct link to the video of the testimony instead of taking you to the web page where the video could be found.] […]

As reported here, the permanent, entrenched, bureaucracy in MARAD has refused to make public any of the actions that the Academy has taken to address […]

Spoiler alert: whole lotta’ nothing  . . . so far. In the continuing quest to provide Academy stakeholders with basic information about the ongoing threat […]

(Update has a link to prepared testimony from a House hearing yesterday at the bottom of the page.) At 10:00 a.m. today, the Acting Maritime […]

UPDATE:  After this post was posted on April 4, 2017, the Academy finally updated the reaccreditation page on its website to provide the following information: […]

I asked MARAD to expedite the KingsPointSentry FOIA request for the copy of the Monitoring Report that the Academy submitted to the Middle States Commission […]

Since the Academy refuses to update its stakeholders on the status of its efforts to avoid losing accreditation (today marks 270 days since the last […]

In the recent posts (here and here) about the hijacking of the mission of the Congressional Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (“SAPR”) Working Group, I’ve […]

Why the hijacking of the SAPR Working Group could threaten the reaccreditation of USMMA. On April 20, 2016, seemingly innocuous legislation proposed by MARAD was […]

It is critical that Secretary Chao ask Congress to delay the delivery deadline for the USMMA Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) Working Group report […]

Yesterday, March 1, 2017, was the deadline for the Academy to provide a “monitoring report” to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education that would […]

Last June, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) put USMMA on accreditation warning. It is the only federal academy ever to be placed […]

Four. Keep that number in your head.  Four.  That is the number of graduates from New York (SUNY) Maritime in 2010 (the last, and only, […]

[UPDATE: In this post, we  put together the pieces of the puzzle that showed how MARAD was attempting to manipulate Congress. Another piece of the […]

Joseph Keefe writes a regular column for MaritimeProfessional.com  and his column regularly reports on various aspects of the state of maritime education.  His most recent […]

Introduction: Last Friday, the Office of Student Activities (“OSA”) published a Facebook post (now removed, but a screen capture is here) about possible weekend activities […]

Earlier this week, Representative Peter T. King and Senator Roger F. Wicker wrote Jim Tobin, the president of the USMMA Alumni Association and Foundation, to […]

An alert alumnus has pointed out an anomaly about the LMI culture study that was commissioned by former Secretary Foxx at a cost of $363,000 […]

A reliable source from within DOT advises me that there are five other commercial shipping companies (in addition to the three that were initially approved […]

If it weren’t for double standards, Academy leadership wouldn’t have any standards at all. This is from the the Facebook page for the USMMA Office […]

After the November elections, the outgoing MARAD and DOT political appointees were forced to scramble. First, they had to confront the reality that neither they […]

Here’s the text of the email released  by MARAD: MARAD 01-17 Wednesday, February 15, 2017 Contact:  Kim Strong Tel.:  (202) 366-5807 United States Merchant Marine […]

The late General Norman Schwarzkopf once said: “You learn far more from negative leadership than from positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do […]