Four days after he was sworn in as Minister of Defense, Pete Hegseth directed the Military Service Academies to rub their curriculum from ideologies, President Trump had considered “divisive”, “non -American” and “irrational”.
A few hours later, Heads of the Department at West Point sent citizens and military teachers’ e -mails demanding their lessons.
Some professors said they assume that the school would defend its academic program. Instead, the leaders of the US Military Academy began a school boost to remove any readings focused on the race, gender or darkest moments of American history, according to interviews with more than twelve citizens and military personnel. Most spoke about the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to speak with the media without the approval of the Academy.
Two classes – one lesson of English and historians – had dissolved the midsemester for non -compliance with the new policy.
A history professor who leads a genocide lesson instructed not to mention the atrocities committed against indigenous Americans, according to several academy officials. The English section was cleaned works by well-known black writers, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates, officials said.
Mr Hegseth’s order, issued in January, and West Point’s response has shaken the Academy and led many political and military teachers to challenge the school’s commitment to academic freedom. At least two teachers have resigned from the last few days.
The leaders of the Academy have long needed to balance the contradictory demands. West Point is an institution that grants a degree and its commitment to academic freedom is codified by both law and its own regulations. It is also part of the Department of Defense and its leaders are obliged to follow legal commands by the President and the Pentagon.
The bitter and party warriors who have separated the country in recent years, They put the West Point, the military leaders and his trainers at an increasingly difficult spot. Mr Hegseth’s command has served to increase the pressure.
Ever since he took over the Pentagon, Mr. Hegseth has promised to restore the “ethics of warrior” to a force that said he penetrated by the “Marxist” teachers, the “Saboteurs Social Justice” and “Feckless Generals”.
A West Point spokesman said in a statement that the Academy had reviewed its curriculum “in accordance with the executive orders” and the pentagon’s guidance. “We are sure that our strict academic program ensures that Cadets are developing the spiritual flexibility needed to make critical decisions in the chaos of war,” the statement said.
Mr. Hegseth and the changes they have caused have forced West Point teachers and managers to fight with a series of difficult questions. Should they resist Mr Hegseth’s order or resign in protest? His tongue was confusing vague. Was there any ways to do it? What was better for the inferior, for the Academy, for the Army?
Some long -term leaders at the Academy chose to stop.
In early March, Christopher Barth, a High Librarian of West Point, announced that he had left after 14 years to work at another college. Mr Barth’s counterpart at the US Naval Academy had already said to remove 381 books from the campus library that ran from Mr. Hegseth’s mandate. Mr Barth had also said to identify titles that may have violated the series, West Point officials said.
He told his staff that he was reading the guidelines of the American Library. “I have already at stake several times,” Mr Barth said, according to three people at the meeting. “I can’t do it anymore.”
Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy, also wrote in a New York Times visitors published on Thursday that Mr Hegseth’s order and the changes that followed to West Point had politicized the Academy and made him unable to do his job.
“I am ashamed to connect with the academy with its current form,” he wrote.
An aggressive professor in the English department at West Point for nearly a decade hit her crushed point in late April, when a university administrator told her that she no longer allowed him to teach an essay from novelist Alice Walker.
In the essay, written in 1972, Ms Walker describes the difficulties her mother – a share and a sewing in rural agriculture – faced and encouraged readers to examine the missing voices from American history.
The professor, citing concerns about privacy, asked not to be named. He appealed to the ban on the head of the department and the Dean, both confirmed that he had to cut or replace the text. In an interview, the professor said that he was not given a clear reason why she was no longer allowed to teach the essay.
Mr Hegseth’s mandate forbids teachers from providing “teaching” to “theory of critical race” and “gender ideology”. It also requires services academies to teach that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history”.
The professor said she knew that her resignation was unlikely to make a difference to West Point. “I could shoot myself in the middle of the past and will be forgotten for tomorrow,” she recalled to say to her bosses.
But he decided that he could not continue at the Academy. She dedicated part of her last class in late April to explain to the inferior why she refused to find a substitute for Ms Walker’s essay and why she left the West Point.
A few days later, a Cadet sent her an email that thanks her for her courage. He wrote that it was the first time he had seen someone stand for something that cost them immediately.
West Point occupies a unique position in the army. In the classroom, the captains can disagree and disagree as in any political university.
But the Academy is undoubtedly part of the army. The classes start with a Marcher section selected by the instructor, calling the classroom to attention, receiving a roll, performing a uniform inspection and greeting. Participation is mandatory.
Political and military teachers in West Point have the freedom “to explore, express professional views, teach and learn” in classes and academic sectors, in accordance with army regulations. But they are also “nation officials”, states of military policy and are subject to the orders of the president and the political pressures that come with the huge federal bureaucracy.
In interviews, faculty members West Point feared that all kinds of public protest would lead to their dismissal.
Some trainers have replaced banned texts with works by less well -known writers who make similar arguments. Others have been looking for ways to record their concern.
A West Point philosophy lesson, required by all secondary students of the Academy, until recently included a lesson for Immanuel Kant, a key element in the philosophy of Western Enlightenment. The lesson noted that Kant was also a supporter of the racial hierarchies and encouraged the inferior to fight with the contradiction.
West Point administrators decided in early February that the lesson violated Mr Hegseth’s mandate. Instead of teaching it, a philosophy trainer devoted the class of the day to Plato’s apology, which records Socrates’ defense in his trial for the trivial and corruption of the Athenian youth. Students discussed the importance of speech difficult truths, according to two teachers familiar with class.
Several political and military professors shocked the lack of debate on how to apply Mr Hegseth’s order and how quickly it is.
Two black writers – Ms Morrison and Mr Coates – whose works are no longer allowed to be taught at West Point, had previously welcomed as speakers on campus. In 2013, Ms Morrison reads excerpts from “Home”, her novel about a Black Korean War veteran struggling with PTSD and his return to a divided America. They watched more than 1,500 captains.
Four years later, Mr Cates urged an audience of 800 first -year chains to examine the myths made by the United States and even West Point after the civil war.
“What kind of truth will you support?” He asked them, according to a video of his speech recently removed from the internet. “Will you ask yourself the narratives that this country says, or will you allow lies to insist?”
Dr. Parsons, a professor of philosophy who recently resigned in protest, said he had crossed the River and the river trying to understand what to do.
On April 10, he accepted an annual visitor of a working teacher at the nearby Vassar College. The move meant that it would lose the financial security that came with a persistent position. It also means to leave West Point, a place that was his professional home for 13 years.
The next day he told his supervisors that he had abandoned. Waited for a difficult conversation. “I was very tense,” he recalled.
But his supervisors did not ask him why he resigned from his place of temporary work, he said, and did not voluntarily explain.
“I think there is a great desire to avoid the reality of what is happening here,” Dr. Parsons said.
His experience had caused him a doubt about the leaders of the Army and the West Point. “I have lost the belief that most people will do the right thing under pressure,” Dr. Parsons said. “This is the really painful part of the last few months.”
But he still believed in the captains. “I trust them to succeed,” Dr. Parsons said.
Julie Tait He contributed research.
