Faculty and students at some of the nation’s top military academies are reportedly going underground to continue teaching and studying social justice topics that have been put on the chopping block by the Trump administration.
Cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy have allegedly created non-governmental email addresses in order to continue discussions about books and topics that have been banned by the current administration, including critical race theory, according to The Washington Post.
“We at the Naval Academy are here to prepare young officers to command,” one professor at the school told the paper, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “They need to know what we have learned from our study of politics and history and literature and languages.”
“We are failing them and we are failing in our jobs if we suppress some things we know are true and we parrot other things we know are false,” the professor added.
They went on to say that some of their students feel conflicted about the possibility of active deployment, given their concerns over what kind of orders they may be required to carry out at the behest of the current White House.
Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point who left his position earlier this month in protest of the Trump administration’s new policies, told WaPo that the entirety of the U.S. armed forces has been left reeling from the Trump administration’s abrupt reversal of DEI initiatives and social justice programs.
“It’s a feeling of real whiplash,” Parsons told the newspaper on Saturday. “We used to raise the possibility in the military and beyond, there are still real structural problems with racism and sexism. That would not fly now.”
Parson’s resignation came after he penned an opinion piece for The New York Times, in which he wrote he was now “ashamed to be associated” with West Point following changes instituted by the White House.
“Once a school that strove to give cadets the broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education they need for careers as Army officers, [West Point] was suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses, and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration,” as he put it in that article.
In a long and rambling commencement speech at the academy on Saturday, Trump gave a flavor of some of those changes, vowing to ditch DEI programs and support for transgender service people.
He also pledged to make the military “better than ever before,” criticizing the Joe Biden administration for what he described as “subjecting the armed forces to all manner of social projects.”
Trump and his Defense Secretary, former serviceman Pete Hegseth, have indeed already made good on much of that promise, firing at least nine senior officials from the U.S. military for their perceived support for DEI initiatives under the previous administration.
The post Military Schools Quietly Bucking Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade appeared first on The Daily Beast.
