President Trump’s ban on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs in the federal government and his firing of the boards of visitors of the four military service academies suggest receptivity to broad reforms of Department of Defense (DoD) educational institutions that could eventually benefit American colleges and universities generally. These reforms should include limits on professors’ abilities to spread seditious ideologies, strict supervision of curricula, and elimination of the dysfunctional institution of tenure.
Trump accurately declared that the academies were “infiltrated by woke leftist ideologies.” In the Biden years, research began to identify ways DEI polluted both DoD education and the uniformed military. For example, Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions concluded in its report on DoD educational institutions that “DEI carries inherently negative messages about Western civilization generally, and about the United States and its people specifically.” Furthermore, “[t]raining is implemented by a vast DEI bureaucracy that extends from senior leaders at the Pentagon to the lowest ranks.”
The service academies, the service and national war colleges, and the Naval Postgraduate School offer enticing opportunities for DEI-related reform because they are dedicated to supporting the mission of the DoD—national defense—and not the pursuit of knowledge often claimed for universities broadly. The Naval Academy Faculty Handbook, for example, reminds professors that they are to provide “the measure of academic excellence and the continuity needed to maintain the Academy as the leading source of officers for the sea services.” All DoD educational institutions have similar missions.
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The service academies and service war colleges take orders from the services on core policies, including DEI. For example, the Air Force built DEI into the Air Force Academy’s policies and culture in 2012 in an instruction that was updated in 2019. Biden administration officials at the academies instituted an extensive set of DEI-rationalized policies, plans, and programs and established offices to administer them. Only some of these were disbanded after Trump’s initial DEI-related orders in 2025.
Advancing the mission of DoD does not mean that professors or students are authorized to “freely” speak in traitorous or seditious ways. Teaching students to know about and understand hostile ideologies is not the same as advocating them. DoD can legitimately monitor the speech of faculty, in and out of classrooms, to ensure that professors advance the cause of national defense, not malign ideologies. Most of these institutions do not embrace the assertion of the American Association of University’s Statement on Professional Ethics that professors should “state the truth as they see it, ” but the Naval Academy does. The secretary of defense can change such policies by executive order.
Administrators have inserted woke ideas into military curricula, involving creating new courses and inclusion of politically radical notions within courses. In the Biden years, the U.S. Military Academy introduced a mandatory seminar on “Understanding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” that discussed structures of “white power” and alleged white rage. A minor in Diversity and Inclusion Studies featured courses such as “The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality,” which includes Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic as assigned reading. According to its syllabus, the course is “an introduction to the concepts of post-modernism” that includes “a focus on feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory.” The Air Force Academy created a similar minor in 2022.
The Naval Academy offers courses such as “Topics in Gender and Sexuality in Literature,” featuring critical race theory and queer theory, topics standard in many colleges’ gender studies departments. The Academy’s Center for Teaching and Learning supports faculty who want to include DEI principles in their teaching.
PowerPoint presentations, such as “How to Create an Anti-Racist Classroom: Developing and Implementing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy,” are among the available resources. Three books by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility are suggested readings. DEI also became the focus of educational outreach functions, such as the Naval War College’s annual two-day “Women, Peace, and Security” Symposium, which in recent years had little to do with U.S. national security. Instead, it featured sessions on gender inequality, climate change, and environmental security in Iran.
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Hence, major curriculum deletions are needed. These institutions should instead offer courses on American history and Western civilization, which are strikingly absent from most civilian college curricula.
As in most of America’s higher education institutes, tenure has been perverted to protect subversive ideas and teaching from reasonable inquiry. Given the mission of DoD education, contemporary rationales for tenure are even more suspect. Yet the Naval Academy’s Faculty Handbook indicates that the Academy subscribes to the principles of the American Association of University Professors regarding tenure. The Naval War College specifies tenure policy in its 2024 Faculty Handbook:
Promotion and tenure are implemented through a concept of shared governance and shared responsibility among the faculty and NWC leadership, subject to and consistent with the needs of the College, U.S. government (USG) regulations, and Department of Defense (DoD), and Department of the Navy (DON) policy.
Hence, refined presidential policies that abolish tenure in favor of contract appointments of several years’ duration and appointment of administrators committed to reform can root Marxian offshoot ideologies out of DoD schools’ organizational cultures in favor of traditional educational programs that enhance national security. These reformed institutions would be models for state-run colleges and universities and legislators who want informed and responsible citizens, not seditious activities protected by claims of “free speech” and tenure rights.
Image of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduation ceremony, May 22, 2021. by West Point – the U.S. Military Academy on Flickr.
