By CDR Breck Henderson, US Navy veteran
Dr. Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy at West Point, recently published an editorial in the New York Times titled “West Point is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate.”
Parsons laments changes in West Point’s curriculum that will eliminate DEI, CRT, gender studies, anti-American history, and other woke, Leftist fare.
Parsons wrote:
“In a matter of days, the United States Military Academy at West Point abandoned its core principles. Once a school that strove to give cadets the broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education they need for careers as Army officers, it was suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”
“Ideological tastes?” Really?
Parsons seems to genuinely believe a ludicrously wrongheaded concept of what counts as indoctrination and what West Point is all about.
We should admire him for having the integrity to resign his position rather than holding on and teaching what he believes he should teach on the sly.
Yet it’s a sign of how far we’ve sunk over the years that an intelligent college professor apparently believes that Leftist ideology is both correct beyond questioning and necessary to the education of a military officer.
So we need to understand what a military academy is actually supposed to teach, as well as how seriously wrong today’s leftist ideology is before we can appreciate the importance of what President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are doing.
A few days after the Parsons editorial, Mr. Doug Phillippone published a fine rebuttal in the Wall Street Journal titled “There Are No Race Theorists In Foxholes.”
Phillippone is a West Point graduate who served several tours in Iraq, and he identifies the core issues West Point trained officers actually need to learn from the philosophy department. He writes:
“When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, I was commanding a Third Infantry Division unit and used West Point’s lessons on jus in bello, or justice in war, to keep my soldiers humane. That moral clarity forged in the U.S. Military Academy guided me in Baghdad and through five subsequent combat tours.”
Further:
“In a packed, four-year program of academics, military drills and physical training, West Point hones cadets into leaders. The philosophy department, where Mr. Parsons taught, is pivotal, teaching jus ad bellum, the ethics of when to wage war, as well as jus in bello, how to fight justly, using texts by Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius and other thinkers. These principles prepare officers for combat’s moral weight, unlike the academic diversions that Mr. Parsons defends.”
More:
“History is littered with examples of humans devolving into barbarism without moral anchors. West Point’s classical ethics training counters these tendencies, ensuring officers lead with integrity. If cadets instead are devoting time to racial and gender studies, they miss that crucial foundation. Mr. Parsons’s call for unrestricted academic freedom risks diluting this focus, potentially leaving cadets unprepared for the battlefield.”
Mr. Phillippone is too kind.
The garbage Mr. Parsons wants to teach is not only philosophically wrongheaded, it is divisive, destroys morale and leaves cadets believing the United States is not worth defending.
Why? The Left is focused on bringing revolutionary change to the world, and toppling the United States is job one.
Why again? The U.S. is living proof that capitalism, even in the constrained form we have currently, brings unparalleled prosperity.
The U.S. is also the last bastion of Western Civilization and all its institutions, which collectively keep us free and flourishing.
All that is anathema to the Left, the means oppressor employ to do their dirty work. Thus destroying the ability of our military to defend Western Civilization and our capitalist economy is high on their to do list.
Mr. Parsons doesn’t mention DEI indoctrination at West Point, one of the academic programs President Trump has slated for the dumpster.
As a reminder, DEI is a reframing of Critical Race Theory, which is a derivative of Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a Marxist academic theory that breaks everything down into a struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors.
From Wikipedia:
“A critical theory is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures.
The common thread linking Marxism and Critical theory is an interest in struggles to dismantle structures of oppression, exclusion, and domination.”
So maybe you’re asking yourself, “can our military really be training and focusing on Marxist philosophy instead of learning how to fight and win the next war?”
Yes, believe it or not, West Point has indoctrinated cadets in DEI, and this is one source of the serious divisiveness and poor morale in our military during the past decade or so. I think we can be fairly certain that Mr. Parsons believes strongly in DEI, and no longer being able to teach it is one of the reasons he’s resigning — although he doesn’t mention it.
It’s important to keep in mind is that the service academies are not liberal arts colleges. They are training grounds for future military leaders, which is a totally different goal.
It happens, however, that there is good bit of coincidence between the two. Cadets and midshipmen need to learn mathematics, engineering and a number of other academic areas in order to function as officers in a technologically-driven military.
There is another huge difference between a service academy and a liberal arts college — the bootcamp-like treatment cadets and midshipmen must endure. Every aspect of their lives is strictly controlled, and God help you if your bed is not made properly or your shoes not spit shined. Inspections, marching drills, parades, physical fitness, and uniforms fill their entire day outside of class and studying.
I’ve known quite a few academy graduates, and they all believe enduring the bootcamp — which is really mental toughness training — was an important ingredient. It tended to weed out the weak of body and mind, leaving only those tough enough to serve effectively.
(It seems to be true, however, that ROTC and Officer Candidate School (OCS) graduates perform just as well by most measures, and academy grads make up only about 20% of the officer corps today, but we can argue over the necessity of academy bootcamp another day.)
The problem President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have is that abandoning the far Left curriculum and returning service academies to their training role for career military officers can look like authoritarianism to Mr. Parsons and his accomplices on the Left. I don’t see any way to avoid that, and we have to develop a thick skin withstand these accusations.
Mr. Parsons describes things from his perspective:
“The trouble began around the time Mr. Trump was sworn in for his second term as president. That week, West Point administrators pressured me to withdraw an article about the military’s obligation to be politically neutral that had been accepted for publication at the national security blog Lawfare. The administrators did not find fault with the article but said they were worried that it might be provocative to the incoming administration. Reluctantly, I complied.
Then came the executive order from Mr. Trump on Jan. 27 and Mr. Hegseth’s memo two days later. Mr. Trump’s order prohibited any educational institution operated by the armed forces from “promoting, advancing or otherwise inculcating” certain “un-American” theories, including “gender ideology” and the idea that “America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.”
Mr. Hegseth’s memo went further, adding that the service academies were prohibited even from providing instruction about such topics. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth also ordered that the academies shall “teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
Yes, our military does have an “obligation to be politically neutral,” but Mr. Parsons is so deeply committed to far Left ideology that he thinks anything else must political propaganda imposed on the whim of an authoritarian President. This is a symptom of the deep divide that besets our nation today.
Mr. Phillippone says it best in his concluding paragraph:
“West Point’s mission is to forge officers who lead with character and discipline and win wars under civilian direction. The changes Mr. Parsons decries—curbing ideologies that divide rather than unite—strengthen this purpose, ensuring that cadets master the ethical principles that guided me and thousands of other officers.”
First published on Breck’s Substack “The Truth is Out There”
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