The Trump Administration Is Changing Our Military Academies for the Worse, and I’m Afraid of the Consequences

4 min readThere's some serious academic fckery going on at West Point. Its source is, of course, the administration's endemic revulsion to the truth, to honest debate, and to the proper purpose of higher education. From The Washington Post:The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school’s new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him. Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. “This violates the First Amendment,” he said, predicting an end to West Point’s professed tolerance for opposing views. Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn’t want to hear it. “Stop talking,” Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, “and sit down.”We may never know how thoroughly the MAGA poison has infected the military, but this directive from HQ clearly has some fans in the officer corps.Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. “It’s like how military officers must not follow illegal orders—” he began to say. "We’re a military institution,” Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. “We follow orders.”Welcome to Prussia on the Hudson.Seven days into his second presidency, Trump issued an executive order forbidding military colleges like West Point from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” ideas that his administration deemed “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational.” It also required teaching that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.” Within weeks, West Point’s dean introduced a revised “academic engagement” policy, stipulating that the school’s nearly 700 professors—roughly a third of whom are civilians—must seek approval from their department head before they could deliver a speech, publish a paper or even speak on a podcast. Bakken had never needed such approval before, he said. One of the first civilian professors hired at West Point, he had taught criminal and constitutional law there since 2000. Nonmilitary faculty were meant to improve West Point’s intellectual rigor and provide an outside perspective. Many uniformed colleagues never fully embraced their presence, however. Bakken, whose colleagues and students described him as a principled but brusque contrarian with a penchant for criticism, had often felt isolated.Lucian Truscott IV has been following the story on his essential Substack. Truscott is a West Point graduate. His grandfather was a general in World War II. (His sixth-great-grandfather was Thomas Jefferson.) He has been a working journalist since the late 1960s. (He hit my radar during the glory days of the Village Voice.) Anyway, his evaluation of the deleterious effect of the policy that landed on Tim Bakken's head is worth quoting at length.A policy that stifles speech at an academic and military institution such as West Point is direct evidence of fear. Our enemies are saying to themselves, Look at them! They’re afraid of their own shadows! We can beat them with our inferior weapons and our weaker economies, because they are so busy beating themselves! With the Trump policy imposed by Pentagon chief Hegseth, the United States has shown the world that our military is afraid of speech that challenges the conventional wisdom, afraid of officers—and in the case of Bakken, civilian professors—who speak out on controversial issues in ways that the military does not officially endorse The Washington Post story describes the anti-DEI policies that were imposed by the Pentagon last year on all the service academies. Cadet clubs that studied Black history and women’s history were cancelled as DEI, and the teaching of subjects that were not approved by the Pentagon was forbidden, such as climate change and the study of authoritarian regimes. One cadet at West Point who sought to write a paper on the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II was ordered to change the subject of his essay. Professors like Bakken were ordered by the dean not to share their opinions with cadets during class.The culture of fear that begins in Washington and is forced throughout the government and even into the classrooms of West Point and the Naval and Air Force Academies does indeed affect the readiness of our armed services to fight wars. An army with soldiers who are too afraid to question bad orders, not to mention refuse illegal ones, is an army that can be pushed around and beaten on the battlefield. That is the case Bakken makes in his book, and he’s exactly right. This country's military success always has been based on its soldiers freedom to use their own initiative. This has been true since the first militia man hid behind a stone wall waiting for the Redcoats to come back from Lexington and Concord. Lockstep thinking never would have come up with the idea of the Navajo codetalkers in World War II. Anything that stifles that initiative is a step backwards toward the kind of European militarism that has lost every time it came up against the American military. Pete Hegseth and his third-generation draft-dodging boss will never understand.