On Tenure and the US Naval Academy

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo with the subject “Refocusing the Military Service Academies on Warfighter Education,” ordering the service academies under his command (Army, Navy, Air Force) to “cease appointing civilian employees to tenured positions.” Signed and annotated in Sharpie, which might convey boldness were it not actually a scrabbling imitation of his boss’s swagger, the memo is clear in its disdain for civilian faculty.

The Naval Academy has both civilian and military faculty. Both groups are smart and care, but they provide different strengths. Broadly, military faculty can help prepare midshipmen for their specific future jobs, while civilian faculty have chosen a career in higher education, are around longer, and keep up with the state of the art through research. Most curricular leadership and course development therefore comes from the civilians, who have long-term tenure-track jobs.

I defend the concept of tenure, but that’s an argument for another day. I concede there are other models of education and research without tenure that could work perfectly well. However, in higher education, “tenure-track” is simply shorthand for a competitive job at a college with high standards. You cannot unilaterally strip away the bedrock job perk of the academic job market without triggering a catastrophic drop in faculty quality. The Naval Academy is about to become a much worse place to learn.

This memo claims tenure “dilutes focus on lethality,” through stagnation, complacency, and a lack of adaptation. In fact, the Naval Academy I worked at for fifteen years was better characterized by too much change, and the job characterized by quite a bit of work. The number of new programs, new elective tracks, new core classes, and new majors that have come through in the computational sciences alone has been exhausting. The academic development responsibilities picked up by everybody, and especially by tenured civilian faculty, have been enormous. There are problems at the Academy, but faculty hiding in their office waiting for retirement while collecting checks is not remotely among them. These new academic programs, and this new work, added capabilities to the graduating class, whether it be in cybersecurity, foreign studies, or data science. These capabilities, you might notice, are exactly those that might be most useful in a modern fight; the argument that we haven’t been focused on “lethality” is just silly. I don’t know what the new short-term gig-economy faculty should be teaching instead, and I’m quite confident the authors of the memo don’t either.

This is not Hegseth doing an inept job of fixing problems at the Academy, because this problem is not a real one that needs fixing. Instead, it’s a performance of a vindictive attack on theoretical people, a bayonet charge at shadow puppets who need to be cut down to size. If the audience leaves the show happy at some snobby made-up academics’ defeat, who cares if it costs something as minor as the education of a few thousand future military officers? The midshipmen will still look good in their whites, the Army-Navy game will continue to dominate sports TV for one weekend a year, and almost nobody will notice.

This wasn’t a surprise to me. It’s laid out in Project 2025: “audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.” Behind the screaming flying monkeys of the administration that collect all the attention, is a set of smart and committed people working their way down a checklist of pain. My colleagues and students at the Naval Academy were just next in line to be hurt.