The Defense Department on Tuesday announced plans to stop hiring civilians for tenured faculty positions at U.S. military service academies, a move that would make it easier to fire some professors in the future.
In a memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the change was needed to ensure the academies are focused on their “warfighting mission” of training military leaders.
“Tenure often leads to academic stagnation, faculty complacency and institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs,” Hegseth said in the memo. “Additionally, it contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics.”
The move appears to be the latest by the Trump administration to make it easier to fire government workers for any reason. In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reclassify about 8,000 senior federal workers, despite complaints that the move would politicize the civil service.
It’s also the latest effort by the Trump administration to exert more control over professors at military service academies.
Last year, a tenured civilian professor sued West Point after the academy barred faculty members from publishing papers, speaking at conferences or appearing on podcasts without first seeking approval from higher-ups. Tim Bakken, the professor, was featured in a Washington Post story in July.
A federal judge found the ban was unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that Bakken could not be prohibited or restrained from “expressing or offering his opinions, beliefs, or views to his students on the subjects he teaches.”
And last month, climate scientist Adam Kalkstein sued the U.S. Military Academy in federal court after his tenured faculty position was eliminated and West Point later declined to renew his teaching contract. Kalkstein’s lawsuit alleges he was punished because he challenged an order to stop teaching students about human contributions to climate change, violating his First Amendment right to free speech.
In an email, Kalkstein argued that preserving tenure is important. “Tenure not only allows the Service Academies to recruit scientists of the highest caliber, but it also ensures an open, free exchange of ideas, something essential in academic environments,” he said.
At universities across the country, many faculty consider tenure to be essential for academic freedom. Typically, tenured faculty can only be fired for cause or extraordinary circumstances, such as the closure of a program or extreme financial hardships. But a number of states, mostly with Republican legislatures, have enacted limits on tenure at publicly funded colleges, saying the changes are needed to ensure universities are more efficient.
The president of the American Association of University Professors said Hegseth’s directive “attacks the independence” that allows professors to tell inconvenient truths.
“Ending new tenured appointments will make it harder to recruit outstanding scholars and easier to pressure professors to tell political leaders what they want to hear,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said in a statement.
Hegseth, a former Army major and weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends,” has also questioned the need for any civilian professors at service academies like West Point, the prestigious training academy for the U.S. Army.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in 2025, Hegseth said West Point shouldn’t employ civilian teachers, calling them “left-wing” and “woke.” After he was sworn into office, he later told West Point graduates that the academy had “hired professors who advocated for anti-American ideologies right here in these halls. But no more.”
Some advocates, however, have argued civilians are needed to improve academic rigor and provide an outside perspective.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 to make it easier for the service academies to hire civilian teachers. Before then, faculties at West Point and the Air Force Academy were almost entirely commissioned officers, while half the teachers at the Naval Academy were already civilians.
Dwight D. Eisenhower also expressed support for the idea after World War II. While serving as the Army chief of staff in 1946, he wrote to West Point’s superintendent arguing that cadets should be taught psychology, with help from knowledgeable civilians, so they could handle “human problems on a human basis.”
The post Hegseth bars military academies from hiring civilians as tenured professors appeared first on Washington Post.
