Helene Cooper, NYT (“Pentagon Furthers Crackdown on Diversity Policies With Fresh Order for Review of Library Books“):
The Pentagon continued its purge of anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion on Friday, ordering all military leaders, commands and academies to review all of the books in their libraries that address racism and sexism.
A memo issued Friday appeared to be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest broadside against diversity and equity programs and materials. The memo was signed by Tim Dill, performing the duties of defense under secretary for personnel.
The memo said books about diversity were “promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology” that “are incompatible with the Department’s core mission.” It requires all department leaders to identify books that fall into that category and remove them from military library shelves by May 21.
At that point, the memo says, there will be further instructions on which books will be permanently removed.
This expands a similar purge recently at the Naval Academy library, in Maryland. Last month, civilian Navy officials, following orders originating from Mr. Hegseth, pulled from shelves books including one that critiqued “The Bell Curve,” a 1994 text that argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people. But the academy kept “The Bell Curve” itself on its shelves.
In a separate memo Friday, Mr. Hegseth also said that there would be “no consideration for race, ethnicity or sex” in admissions to U.S. military academies, which, he said, will focus admissions “exclusively on merit.” He ordered the service academies to rank candidates with “merit-based scores.” It was unclear what exactly that meant, but Mr. Hegseth added that “merit-based scores may give weight to unique athletic talent or other experiences such as prior military service.”
Andrew deGrandpre, WaPo (“Hegseth escalates targeting of race, gender in military’s academic settings“):
The Pentagon on Friday directed the nation’s prestigious military academies to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes, and begin a purge — along with other Defense Department academic institutions — of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts.”
Beginning with the service academies’ next admission cycle, prospective students will be evaluated for acceptance based “exclusively on merit,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in one of two policy memos released by the Pentagon. The document emphasizes that “no consideration” be given to candidates’ race, gender or ethnicity, but factors such as “unique athletic talent” and previous military service may be taken into account.
“This ensures only the most qualified candidates are admitted, trained, and ultimately commissioned to lead the finest fighting force in history,” Hegseth’s memo says. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our Armed Forces.”
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy each ended their race-conscious admissions policies earlier this year, soon after President Donald Trump’s return to office.
The academies’ admissions practices have been the subject of legal scrutiny for the past few years, with the Supreme Court in 2024 denying a conservative group’s emergency request seeking to prevent the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from considering race when choosing its next class of cadets. The high court two years ago rejected the use of affirmative action in college admissions but left unsettled the specific question of whether race may factor in admissions to the service academies, whose graduates go on to serve as military officers.
The military is among the nation’s most diverse institutions, but it has struggled to recruit people — particularly in specialized fields such as cybersecurity and linguistics. Expertise in areas like artificial intelligence also is a fast-growing emphasis for the Defense Department.
To better compete with private-sector employers mining the same talent base, the Pentagon for several years sought to emphasize diversity and inclusivity, arguing that to do otherwise limits the military’s recruiting pool and therefore jeopardizes Americans’ safety.
Hegseth, by contrast, has said “the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity as our strength.’”
The second memo released Friday instructs each of the military services to scour the library collections maintained by their educational institutions — not only the academies, but the various leadership schools attended by military officers later in their careers — and “sequester” materials covering a range of subjects relevant to race and gender.
Greg Jaffe, WaPo (“The Pentagon’s Culture Wars Strike West Point“):
Four days after he was sworn in as defense secretary, Pete Hegseth directed the military service academies to scrub their curriculum of ideologies President Trump had deemed “divisive,” “un-American” and “irrational.”
Hours later, department heads at West Point sent civilian and military professors emails asking for their course syllabuses.
Some professors said they assumed the school would defend its academic program. Instead, the U.S. Military Academy’s leaders initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history, according to interviews with more than a dozen West Point civilian and military staff. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media without the academy’s approval.
Two classes — an English and a history course — were scrapped midsemester for noncompliance with the new policy.
A history professor who leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the officials said.
Mr. Hegseth’s order, which was issued in January, and West Point’s response have shaken the academy and led many civilian and military professors to question the school’s commitment to academic freedom. At least two tenured professors have resigned in protest in recent days.
The academy’s leaders have long had to balance conflicting demands. West Point is a degree-granting institution, and its commitment to academic freedom is codified both in law and its own regulations. It is also part of the Defense Department, and its leaders are obligated to follow legal orders from the president and the Pentagon.
[…]
Mr. Hegseth’s order and the changes it triggered have forced West Point professors and administrators to wrestle with a series of difficult questions. Should they resist Mr. Hegseth’s order or resign in protest? Its language was confoundingly vague. Were there ways to work around it? What was best for the cadets, for the academy, for the Army?
Some long-serving leaders at the academy have chosen to quit.
In early March, Christopher Barth, West Point’s senior librarian, announced that he was leaving after 14 years for a job at another college. Mr. Barth’s counterpart at the U.S. Naval Academy had already been told to remove 381 books from the campus library that ran afoul of Mr. Hegseth’s order. Mr. Barth had also been told to identify titles that potentially violated the order, West Point officials said.
He told his staff that he had been reading the American Library Association’s ethics guidelines. “I’ve already compromised them several times,” Mr. Barth said, according to three people who were at the meeting. “I can’t do it anymore.”
Graham Parsons, a tenured philosophy professor, similarly wrote in a New York Times guest essay published on Thursday that Mr. Hegseth’s order and the changes that followed at West Point had politicized the academy and made it impossible for him to do his job.
“I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form,” he wrote.
A tenured professor in the English department who had been at West Point for nearly a decade hit her breaking point in late April when a university administrator told her that she was no longer permitted to teach an essay by the novelist Alice Walker.
[…]
The professor said she knew her resignation was unlikely to make a difference at West Point. “I could set myself on fire in the middle of the parade grounds and it would be forgotten about tomorrow,” she recalled telling her bosses.
[…]
Dr. Parsons, the philosophy professor who recently resigned in protest, said he spent February and March trying to figure out what he should do.
On April 10, he accepted a one-year visiting professor job at nearby Vassar College. The move meant that he would lose the economic security that came with a tenured position. It also meant leaving West Point, a place that had been his professional home for 13 years.
The next day he told his supervisors he was quitting. He expected a difficult conversation. “I was very tense,” he recalled.
But his supervisors did not ask him why he was giving up his tenured position for a temporary job, he said, and he did not volunteer an explanation.
“I think there’s just a lot of desire to avoid the reality of what’s happening here,” Dr. Parsons said.
It’s difficult in most of these cases to tell were the line is between following the lawful orders of the chain of command and overreacting to vague guidelines. But it’s not the least bit surprising to me that DOD educational institutions, all of which are led by uniformed officers, are doing very little to resist these pressures. Not only are they duty-bound to follow lawful orders, many are likely in agreement with Hegseth that the focus should be on “lethality” and wonder why service academies were teaching Alice Walker to begin with. And even those who fully understand the value of a broad-ranging education that challenges cadets’ preconceptions are unlikely to fight the chain of command over a particular reading in a single course.
Civilian professors at these institutions, including myself, are in a different boat. We don’t have a chain of command, just bosses. We’re hired for our subject matter expertise and to provide institutional continuity, not rotated out every two or three years to keep the institution’s grounding in the operating forces fresh. And, theoretically at least, we have considerably more academic freedom, especially in criticizing administration policy.
West Point and Annapolis are undergraduate institutions and thus have a much broader curriculum than the staff colleges and war colleges, which teach more senior officers at later stages of their careers. Their lesson plans and libraries almost certainly have far more materials that run afoul of the order than is the case for us.
A colleague at the Naval War College, an endowed chair in ethics, has resigned effective the end of this academic year. Given the vagaries of the academic job market, that’s a courageous and difficult decision. But I don’t know how you’d teach philosophy or serve as a librarian under these strictures. It’s one thing to have to be more careful about what you say and write than you’ve been accustomed to; it’s another thing entirely to be put in a position where you have to teach things you don’t believe.
Thankfully, the impact on our curriculum is relatively negligible. The main materials impacting the Security Studies department that we need to scrutinize is related to the Women, Peace, and Security initiative. We’re ostensibly mandated to support it by Act of Congress signed into law, ironically enough, by President Trump early in his first administration. But, really, we’re talking a handful of article-length readings over the course of the academic year.
The larger impact on military education is harder to assess. One presumes much of this will be reversed under the next administration. But four years is the entirety of a cadet’s time at West Point or a midshipman’s at Annapolis. Multiple staff and war college cohorts will be impacted. Those graduates will be somewhat less prepared to deal with some really complex issues.
The degree to which race, ethnicity, and sex impacts selection for the academies is not an issue I’ve looked into in a very long time. I would imagine that we’ll have slightly fewer Black and Hispanic graduates over the next few classes if the selection process is truly race-blind. But, perhaps ironically, we could have far, far more women. For example, the incoming West Point Class of 2028 had 1216 students, of which only 280 were women. The Annapolis Class of 2028 had 1183 entering students, of whom 371 were women. The Class of 2030 might look quite different.
