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.
The bitter and partisan culture wars, which have divided the country in recent years, have put West Point, its military leaders and instructors in an increasingly difficult spot. Mr. Hegseth’s order has served to ratchet up the pressure.
Since taking over the Pentagon, Mr. Hegseth has vowed to restore the “warrior ethos” to a force that he has said was infiltrated by “Marxist” professors, “social justice saboteurs” and “feckless generals.”
A West Point spokesman said in a statement that the academy had reviewed its curriculum “in accordance with executive orders” and Pentagon guidance. “We are confident our rigorous academic program ensures cadets develop the intellectual agility needed to make critical decisions in the chaos of war,” the statement read.
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.
In the essay, written in 1972, Ms. Walker describes the hardships that her mother — a sharecropper and seamstress in rural Georgia — faced, and encourages readers to consider the voices missing from the American story.
The professor, citing privacy concerns, asked not to be named. She appealed the ban to her department head and dean, both of whom confirmed that she needed to cut or replace the text. In an interview, the professor said she was not given a clear reason for why she was no longer permitted to teach the essay.
Mr. Hegseth’s order prohibits professors from providing “instruction” in “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” It also requires the service academies to teach that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
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.
But she decided she could not continue at the academy. She devoted a portion of her last class in late April to explaining to the cadets why she had refused to find a substitute for Ms. Walker’s essay, and why she was leaving West Point.
A few days later, a cadet sent her an email thanking her for her courage. He wrote that it was first time he had ever seen someone stand up for something that directly cost them.
West Point occupies a unique place in the Army. Inside the classroom, cadets can dissent and disagree as they would at any civilian university.
But the academy is unmistakably part of the Army. Classes begin with a section marcher, chosen by the instructor, calling the class to attention, taking roll, performing a uniform inspection and saluting. Attendance is mandatory.
Civilian and military professors at West Point have the freedom “to inquire, express professional views, teach and learn” in their classrooms and academic disciplines, according to Army regulations. But they are also “servants of the nation,” Army policy states, and subject to the president’s orders and the political pressures that come with being part of the vast federal bureaucracy.
In interviews, West Point faculty members have expressed fear that any kind of public protest would lead to their dismissal.
Some instructors replaced banned texts with works by lesser-known authors making similar arguments. Others searched for ways to register their concern.
A West Point philosophy course, required of all the academy’s sophomores, until recently included a lesson on Immanuel Kant, a key figure in Western enlightenment philosophy. The lesson noted that Kant was also a proponent of racial hierarchies, and it encouraged cadets to wrestle with the contradiction.
West Point administrators decided in early February that the lesson violated Mr. Hegseth’s order. Instead of teaching it, one philosophy instructor devoted the day’s class to Plato’s Apology, which chronicles Socrates’ defense at his trial for impiety and the corruption of Athenian youth. The students discussed the importance of speaking difficult truths, according to two professors familiar with the class.
Several civilian and military professors expressed shock at the lack of debate over how to implement Mr. Hegseth’s order and how quickly it was enforced.
Two Black authors — Ms. Morrison and Mr. Coates — whose works were no longer permitted to be taught at West Point, had previously been welcomed as speakers on campus. In 2013, Ms. Morrison read passages from “Home,” her novel about a Black Korean War veteran struggling with PTSD and his return to a segregated America. More than 1,500 cadets attended.
Four years later, Mr. Coates urged an audience of 800 first-year cadets to examine the myths that the United States, and even West Point, had constructed after the Civil War.
“What kind of truth will you uphold?” he asked them, according to a video of his speech that was recently removed from the internet. “Will you interrogate the narratives this country tells itself, or will you allow lies to persist?”
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.
His experience had caused him to doubt the Army’s and West Point’s leaders. “I’ve lost faith that most people will do the right thing under pressure,” Dr. Parsons said. “That’s the really painful part of the last few months.”
But he still believed in the cadets. “I trust them to succeed,” Dr. Parsons said.
Julie Tate contributed research.
