By CDR J.A. Cauthen, US Navy ret, USNA ’02
After years of obfuscation and denial, the U.S. Naval Academy, in a suit brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), recently admitted to using an applicant’s race during the admissions process.
SFFA had sought to compel the Naval Academy to apply the same non-discrimination standards that the Supreme Court required in 2023’s SFFA v. Harvard. Ultimately, Judge Richard D. Bennett ruled that “the Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions program withstands the strict scrutiny in the ambit of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Harvard case.”
Notably, Judge Bennett wrote that the Naval Academy’s admissions process complies with the Supreme Court’s strict-scrutiny standard because a diverse officer corps serves a compelling governmental interest and national security imperative.
The academy, wrote Bennett, “has proven that this national security interest is indeed measurable and that its admissions program is narrowly tailored to meet that interest.”
Yet the Naval Academy could not cite any studies (nor has the Defense Department) showing that “racially diverse units perform quantifiably better in combat than less diverse units,” as Major Matthew H. Ormsbee argued in a recent Harvard Law Review essay.
Furthermore, as Major Ormsbee demonstrates, the “Naval Academy not only sets explicit racial composition ‘goals’ for each class but also tracks compliance in what effectively operates as a quota system in camouflage.”
As other writers and I have previously argued, and contra Judge Bennett, none of the Naval Academy’s actions comport with current law, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard.
Not only are the Naval Academy’s arguments specious, but the admissions data, when thoroughly examined, do not support the district court’s opinion in this case.
As the political scientist Zach Goldberg demonstrated in a recent essay, rigorous analysis of admissions data refutes the Naval Academy’s “claims that racial considerations are limited and non-determinative.” In fact, the data “demonstrate that racial preferences play a decisive role in admission outcomes.”
When interrogated comprehensively, the Naval Academy’s arguments and the court’s endorsement of a compelling national-security interest collapse under the weight of their own logical incoherence.
“While packaged in the language of national security,” writes Major Ormsbee, “the Naval Academy’s racial preferences reflect the same stereotypes and racial balancing that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected.”
The current corrective to this corrosive argument and ruling has come not through the judicial appeals process but by Presidential Executive Order and Secretary of Defense Memorandum. Both orders direct the armed forces to return to a colorblind, non-discriminatory policy, including the military service academies.
“President Trump is committed to a merit-based system of sex-neutral policies and colorblind recruitment, promotion, and retention,” a White House fact sheet pledges, and Secretary Hegseth’s order explicitly prohibits the three military service academies from using race, ethnicity, or sex in their admissions processes. Merit will be the only measure for admissions—for now, at least.
In March of this year, and in response to the president’s order, the Naval Academy declared that it had ended its use of race in admissions, a move echoed by West Point and the Air Force Academy a few weeks later.
Yet, despite this policy reversal, Judge Bennett’s ruling remains in effect and serves as a potential precedent for future cases brought against the service academies should policy revert during a future administration. Bennett’s ruling could provide judicial cover to future activists unless a higher court, possibly the Supreme Court, intervenes.
The Biden administration and Naval Academy went to great lengths defending race-based admissions during the last challenge. There is no reason to believe a future administration holding similar policy views would not do so again. Allies and various advocacy groups are already constructing convoluted legal arguments designed to enshrine identity-based discrimination at the service academies and likely across the armed forces when and if these cases are resurrected.
Unfortunately, internal government ideologues are adroit bureaucratic practitioners, exercising patience, persistence, and resistance.
Their so-called malicious compliance often borders on the absurd, as when the Air Force recently removed a website celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen and the Naval Academy scrapped nearly 400 books in its library.
As a recent (pseudonymous) Defense Department employee wrote in a blog, Hegseth “believes in meritocracy—as long as the meritorious individuals are straight white men. Anyone else isn’t an example, but a threat.” Of course, the author’s jeremiad offers no assertions based on any evidence of racist or discriminatory actions. The author’s words, however, illustrate an obsession with race and identity that will find its way back into policy if given an opportunity.
The words and actions of current and former employees highlight the pervasiveness of institutional capture and how quickly the next administration could revert to the status-quo ante when progressives return to power.
Pres. Trump’s executive orders and Sec. Hegseth’s memos, a West Point professor recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed, are “brazen demands to indoctrinate, not educate.”
Professor Parsons is likely not alone in this belief. Faculty and their administrative confederates will no doubt be eager to reinstitute the destructive DEI agenda of the last few years, a program designed to indoctrinate the nation’s officer corps in beliefs antithetical to their oath of office and the Constitution.
West Point and the other service academies, including the Naval Academy, are not traditional civilian academic institutions. This critical difference must always guide the curriculum at service academies.
Fashionable academic and intellectual “diversions,” as Doug Philippone opined recently in the Wall Street Journal, are opposed to the unique mission of crafting officers whose fealty rests with the Constitution.
An academic course of study rooted in Critical Race Theory violates both the institutions’ missions and an officer’s oath.
As I argued in a previous essay, these “grievance studies” are in fact the mechanisms of indoctrination, leading to an erosion in professionalism.
Sec. Hegseth’s memo, unfortunately, offers a backdoor to resuscitate discriminatory admissions practices and revive the DEI apparatus. After definitively stating that merit will be the only measure of admissions going forward, Sec. Hegseth then offers a caveat: “Merit-based scores may give weight to unique athletic talent or other experiences such as prior military service or performance at a MSA preparatory school.” Even before progressives retake power, activists will no doubt seize upon this backdoor option to revive some variant of discriminatory admissions practices while feigning compliance.
At issue are the ill-defined phrases “unique athletic talent” and “other experiences.” The phrases are ambiguous, and the memo provides no definition or limits. These words will give activists wide latitude in the weighing of applicants. An applicant who writes, for example, that he excels in billiards and spent his senior year in high school amassing a large Instagram following may very well meet both the letter and spirit of this carve-out.
Furthermore, what constitutes an “MSA preparatory school”? Is this exception limited to the official service academy preparatory schools, or does enrollment in other military schools and civilian university ROTC programs meet the requirement? Either way, by allowing feeder sources to circumvent a purely merit-based assessment, Hegseth will allow clever admissions staff to advance their agenda, all while legitimately referring to the memo to justify themselves.
The purveyors of a racial spoils system are not defeated, and many remain in the bureaucratic shadows of government.
When returned to power they will emerge to stealthily implement, with the imprimatur of judicial blessing, their pernicious and discriminatory agenda. The president’s various orders and the defense secretary’s memos may yet prove resilient, but these directives are only as durable as the current administration’s time in office.
All three branches of the federal government must coordinate their actions to ensure that changes are institutionalized and can survive the vicissitudes of changes in power.
As Zach Goldberg writes, “Without stronger institutional safeguards, future administrations could reinstate racial preferences with little resistance.” Therefore, “policymakers must act across all fronts—judicial, legislative, and executive.”
With the academies voluntarily ending their discriminatory admissions processes, “it is essential that courts remain skeptical of mootness claims based solely on informal or facially neutral policy changes.” Adjudicating this in court, potentially at the Supreme Court, will be crucial.
Additionally, legislation offers durability that will better survive a future Congress and antagonistic administration. As the Trump administration is already doing, Goldberg further recommends applying broad-based executive action, including the establishment of a “commission to scrutinize the untested claims behind the military’s ‘diversity rationale.’”
Policymakers would do well to remember that the nation’s service academies are not civilian universities.
Curricula and training must match the mission of creating and graduating officers in the combat arms, not be adulterated by faddish and abstract “grievance studies” courses and programs to match the prevailing sentiment at civilian institutions.
The Naval Academy’s motto, “Ex Scientia Tridens,” translates to “From Knowledge, Seapower.”
The development and acquisition of this knowledge by midshipmen underpins national security, not a compromised admissions process designed to create superficial racial balance among the officer corps by assigning greater worth to one race over another.
Merit, as the current administration has stressed, is the only remedy for this ill.
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J.A. Cauthen, a retired naval officer, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2002 and taught in the history department from 2007 to 2010. He is a commission member for the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions’ report on civic education in the military.
First published on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
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