Hegseth directs military academies to stop giving tenure to civilian professors

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo Tuesday directing institutions like the Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy in Annapolis to immediately stop granting tenure to civilian faculty, in Hegseth’s latest change to military higher education.

“Tenure often leads to academic stagnation, faculty complacency, and institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs,” he wrote. “Additionally, it contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics.”

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

The move comes two months after CBS News exclusively reported that top Pentagon officials were considering ending civilian tenure at the military academies and launching a “line-by-line” review of their courses, eliminating classes that were judged to be “ideologically driven.”

The service academies’ teaching staff includes a mixture of active-duty officers and civilians. Only about 25% of the faculty at the Army’s West Point academy are civilians, while the Naval Academy has roughly equal numbers of civilians and officers. 

For decades, civilian faculty members have been granted tenure. During 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.”

The service academies have long sought to balance their roles both as 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 the school is designed to equip future military leaders with “the intellectual agility needed to make critical decisions in the chaos of war.”

But Hegseth has pushed for sweeping changes, alleging the military’s educational system is ideologically skewed. Since he took the helm as defense secretary, the Pentagon has scrutinized library books that address race and gender, cut ties with graduate programs at Harvard and Princeton, and directed the military to halt all instruction on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Hegseth suggested during his Senate confirmation hearings last year that he planned to take aim at civilian faculty.

“We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy as a tour to teach with their wisdom of what they’ve learned in uniform,” he said, “instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities.”