From Book Bans to Canceled Lectures, the Naval Academy Is Bending to Trump

New York Times

24-04-2025

For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy's annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials.
But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start.
The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of 'The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,' it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government's foreign aid programs.
According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school's leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president.
The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy's library, and the school's cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters.
Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy's in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon's chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief.
The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution's academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon.
A Discussion of Coups and Corruption
Even before the presidential election, the academy began preparing for Mr. Trump's potential return to power.
In January 2024, the academy's history department had invited Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, to give a lecture as part of a prestigious annual series that has brought eminent historians to the campus since 1980.
She was scheduled to speak on Oct. 10 about how the military in Italy and Chile had adapted to autocratic takeovers of those countries. The title of her lecture was 'Militaries and Authoritarian Regimes: Coups, Corruption and the Costs of Losing Democracy.'
Ms. Ben-Ghiat, who had written and spoken critically about Mr. Trump, said she had not intended to discuss what she considers his authoritarian tendencies in front of the students as part of the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture series at the academy. Even so, just a week before her lecture, an off-campus group formed in opposition to her invitation.
After reports about the upcoming lecture by right-wing outlets, Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, wrote to Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy's superintendent, on Oct. 3 urging her to disinvite Ms. Ben-Ghiat from speaking to the midshipmen, as the students are called.
The next day the Naval Academy's dean of academics, Samara L. Firebaugh, called to say the lecture had been postponed, Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled.
It was one month before the election.
Although victorious, the critics still were not satisfied. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society criticized Ms. Ben-Ghiat's invitation, even after it was revoked. A group of 17 House Republicans said in a letter to Admiral Davids that the situation had raised concerns about 'the academy's process for choosing guest speakers.'
Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled that she was told that the lecture was a potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law that limits certain political activities of federal employees.
'That would have only been true if I had been talking about current U.S. politics and Trump's attitude to the U.S. military, and that was never part of the plan,' she said.
Ms. Ben-Ghiat now assumes that the lecture will never be rescheduled.
'A small purge was orchestrated,' she wrote in February about the cancellation of her lecture, 'to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place.'
'It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more,' she added.
A Climate Lecture
On March 10, leaders from the academy's class of 1969 got their own unwelcome message from Ms. Firebaugh.
The class, which graduated at the height of the Vietnam War, sponsors the Michelson lecture series, which has been given annually since 1981. The event brings in academic luminaries for midshipmen studying chemistry, computer science, mathematics, oceanography and physics.
This year's lecture, which was scheduled for April 14, would have welcomed Susan Solomon, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a recipient of the National Medal of Science.
But like Ms. Ben-Ghiat's talk, Ms. Solomon's lecture was canceled as well.
'Unfortunately, the topic that we had selected for this year was not well aligned with executive orders and other directives,' the academic dean wrote in an email, which was shared with The New York Times, 'and there was insufficient time to select a new speaker that would be of sufficient stature for this series.'
M.I.T., Ms. Solomon and Ms. Firebaugh did not respond to requests for comment.
A Book Ban
In late March, Mr. Hegseth's office directed the school to comply with a Jan. 29 executive order intended to end 'radical indoctrination' in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms.
According to several school officials, the academy initially tried to push back by stating the obvious: The order did not apply because the academy is a college.
Mr. Hegseth's office ordered them to comply anyway.
By April 1, 381 books had been removed from the school's Nimitz Library, which was named for Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, a five-star naval hero of World War II who graduated from the academy in 1905.
'I think he would have expected honest pushback,' his granddaughter, Sarah Nimitz Smith, said in an interview. 'He never would have thought the academy would fold.'
Soon afterward, the New Press, which publishes three of the now-removed books, offered faculty members at the academy free copies for the midshipmen they teach.
'We thought book banning had gone the way of the Third Reich, and we're very unhappy to see it again,' Diane Wachtell, the executive director of the New Press, said in an interview.
At least two members of the faculty have resigned in protest of the book ban, and 18 others at the school have opted for early retirement, according to several campus officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Around the same time that books about race, racism, gender and sexuality were being pulled from Nimitz's shelves, an award-winning filmmaker was on the chopping block as well.
A Documentary
In November, representatives for the filmmaker Ken Burns reached out to the academy with an offer to screen clips from his new six-part series on the American Revolution at the academy in a private event for a select group of midshipmen. The school accepted and booked the event for April 22.
But in late March, the school's leadership felt that Mr. Burns's criticisms of Mr. Trump before the 2024 election could cause another outcry from conservative think tanks and Republican members of Congress.
According to three Navy officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, Admiral Davids initially ordered her staff to cancel Mr. Burns's event but later decided to reschedule it for the next academic year.
An Ethics Lecture
On April 14, the academy's leaders canceled a third lecture.
The author Ryan Holiday had planned to speak to midshipmen about Stoic philosophy, and why it was important to read books that challenged their thinking. But he said a staff member at the academy's Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership screened his presentation and objected to its discussion of the school's book ban, which included screenshots of Times reporting about it.
Named for Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale, who graduated from the academy in 1947, the center pays homage to his service as a leader of American prisoners of war in Hanoi. After the war, the admiral often said his postgraduate studies on the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had offered him an edge over his interrogators.
'My father would engage in conversation with his tormentors, questioning them about Vietnam's Communist Party while they were trying to break him,' the admiral's eldest son, Jim Stockdale, recalled in an interview, noting that his father enraged one of his interrogators by besting him on the finer points of Leninism in an argument.
'I was able to do a duel in dialogue with the guy,' Mr. Stockdale recalled his father saying after the war. 'That was like a magic trick in a torture prison in an autocracy.'
An Annual Dedication
William McBride, a history professor, retired in January after 30 years at the academy.
He was invited to stand beside Admiral Davids on April 25 at the school's annual Dedication Parade, where midshipmen don their dress uniforms and march with rifles to honor retiring faculty members.
But on Saturday, Mr. McBride, who graduated from the academy in 1974, declined the honor and fired off a broadside against the admiral.
The book ban, he said, was a 'limitation on the intellectual inquiry of midshipmen' that 'is contrary to the academy's motto: 'From Knowledge, Sea Power,'' and had damaged the school's mission.
In an email sent to the admiral and shared with The Times, Mr. McBride accused the school of tarnishing its reputation by bending to political pressure.
He cited a line all incoming students had to memorize when he began his studies there 55 years ago: 'Where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency.'
'No matter what you have done before,' he wrote, 'your legacy will be that of a careerist who banned Maya Angelou but retained Hitler's 'Mein Kampf.''