Hegseth orders military service academies to immediately stop giving positions to civilian professors

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo Tuesday ordering institutions like the West Point Military Academy and the Naval Academy in Annapolis to immediately stop granting positions to civilian professors, in the latest change Hegseth is making to military higher education.

“Tenure often leads to academic stagnation, faculty complacency, and an institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs,” he writes. “Additionally, it contributes to an agenda that shifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of tenured scholars.”

Hegseth said his goal was to “address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic standards to dilute our focus on lethality.”

The move comes two months later CBS News exclusively reported that top Pentagon officials were considering ending civilian tenures at the military academies and launching a “line-by-line” review of their courses, eliminating classes deemed “ideologically motivated.”

The teaching staff at military academies includes a mix of active duty officers and civilians. Only about 25 percent of West Point Military Academy’s faculty are civilians, while the Naval Academy has roughly equal numbers of civilians and officers.

For decades, civilian professors were granted tenure. At a Senate hearing last year, Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, then superintendent of the Naval Academy, described tenure as a “wonderful recruiting tool” that attracts “the best and the brightest.”

Military academies have long sought to balance their roles as both military institutions that prepare future officers and accredited, rigorous universities. Retired Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland, former superintendent of the Military Academy, told lawmakers last year that the school was designed to equip future military leaders with the “intellectual agility necessary to make critical decisions in the chaos of war.”

But Hegseth has pushed for sweeping changes, alleging that the military education system is ideologically biased. Since becoming Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon has library books scrutinized that address race and gender, cut ties with graduate programs at Harvard and Princeton, and ordered the military to suspend all training on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Hegseth suggested during his Senate confirmation hearings last year that he planned to go after civilian professors.

“We need more uniformed members returning to West Point, to the Air Force Academy, to the Naval Academy to teach with their wisdom what they learned in uniform,” he said, “instead of just more civilian professors coming from the same left-wing and woke universities.”