Morning Wire - A Roadmap to Fixing America’s Service Academies | Sunday Extra

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

The U.S. service academies are producing a shrinking share of officers while embracing more left-leaning policies. Former Naval Academy professor Bruce Fleming explains the problems and how to solve them. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st, directed by David Frankel. The U.S. Service Academies are produced. a shrinking share of officers while embracing more policies and curricula from left-leaning civilian schools. Some observers say this is hurting the preparedness of the military. In this episode, we talk with a former Naval Academy professor who is sounding the alarm over the direction of America's Service Academies. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howe.

It's Sunday, January 14th, and this is an extra edition of Pointing Wire. Joining us now is Bruce Fleming, former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, an author of Saving Our Service Academies, My Battle With and for the U.S. Naval Academy to make thinking officers. Bruce, thanks so much for coming on. First, tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, I'm from what you might call a true blue liberal background. I have a master's from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt.

I taught for five years outside of the United States. And in 1987, I was offered the job at Annapolis, and I was thrilled to come. because I admired the Naval Academy. I have learned some things about it since 1987, but that's certainly the attitude that I had when I came in. So your most recent book is focused on what you call corruption and rot inside the military service academies. Can you describe the significant changes you've seen in the academies over your career?

Well, it's not only during my career, which actually is year 36. Things began to change for the service academies after World War II. up into that point, it was basically true that if you wanted to become, in this case, a naval officer, you had to go to Annapolis. So what happened after World War II was that ROTC was beefed up exponentially, and officer candidate school was used to a much greater degree. So the percentage of officers produced by the service academies has dropped radically. It used to be close to 100%. Now, at Annapolis, for example, it's fewer than one in five, about the same thing is true of West Point. So about 18 percent. So that's one thing that's changed. They've dropped in relevance,

first of all. The second thing that's changed is that colleges outside of the service academies got really, really expensive, whereas the service academies, of course, are paid for by taxpayer money, and each student, I guess you could say, gets a scholarship, we don't put it like that. The cost to taxpayers of one Naval Academy or West Point graduate is about half a million dollars. That's about four times more than what an ROTC officer costs. So they're expensive. We don't really need them. We could get just the same amount of officers by beefing up ROTC. So those are two, what you might call structural changes. The Service Academies decided that they were going to follow the way the wind was blowing. So, of course, the wind changed in higher education.

So the service academies were forced by Congress to accept women. In Annapolis, it was 1976. The first women graduated in 1980. So women arrived. And this was dealt with really badly, incredibly badly. I've talked to women from the first several years, and it was a disaster for them because nothing was done to make the situation more acceptable to them. But now it's close to half female in recent classes.

So women, men, majors were introduced. It used to be that until 1936, in fact, the service academies didn't give a bachelor's degree. They were just training for the services. The Naval Academy started in 1845 because it became clear that the Navy, the ships they were on, were so complex that they couldn't just learn as apprentices. So it was realized that they needed to have a classroom component. And that was introduced. but the classroom component now is essentially identical to what they can get anywhere else. So you would think that we have all of the developments coming from the outside world.

The kick is that the institutions have not gotten flexible. Institutions outside of the Service Academy since the 60s basically have given up on being in the position of what we usually call in loco parentis acting as the parents to the kids, telling them what to do. You know, sex is not patrolled and so on. At the service academies, at the Naval Academy, in specific, to start with this, sex is patrolled. They're not even supposed to hold hands on the 338 acres of what's called our yard. So that's ridiculous. They live in the same dormitory. There are almost as many girls as boys. Outgays are no longer thrown out. And yet they're punished for normal interactions. The control is becoming.

more absolute. I hope you can see where I'm going with this, that we've loosened what's going on at the service academies, but we haven't loosened the constraints on them. So as the service academies become more like and indeed are like the world outside, the only thing that differentiates them is the amount of control that's exercised on them by the administration. So I say it's a pot that's boiling more and more furiously. And, of course, in order to keep the thing from exploding, the top has to be pressed down more and more firmly. I think they will at some point explode. I mean, they're just not tenable. You've said these academies are concentrated battlegrounds of our current culture war. Oh, absolutely. You're touching on that here, but can you expand on that

a little bit more for us? Sure. The thing about the service academies is related to what I just said, which is that they're run by the military that has not just the usual administrative power that you see at civilian colleges and institutions, but the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All the students are actually in, in the military, in the Navy at Annapolis, of course, and in the Army at West Point, in Air Force at Colorado Springs and so on. So the administration, instead of just, you know, wagging their fingers at them, they can actually punish them. with legal means. So the culture wars take the usual form at Annapolis, but they're much stronger. For example, the subtitle of my book is My Battle With and for the United States Naval Academy

to make Thinking Officers. So the battle for is I want it to be what it says it is, which it isn't. But the battle with is that I started writing things about what was actually going on at the service academies at Annapolis close to 20 years ago. And the administration, responded not the way they should have responded to what was ostensibly a tenured professor writing for, you know, outlets like the Washington Post for mainstream publications, they started punishing me. It started with an angry letter from the then-superintendent saying it wasn't professional for professors to write articles, and it escalated from there through official letters of reprimand, loss of pay, I was finally fired in 2018, I was reinstated in

2019 retroactively. So what was all this for? It was for me objecting to the administration forcing all of these culture war changes down the throats of the students. And they were ill-thought-out. So number one was, I was on the admissions board and discovered that what we were doing was racist. If an applicant self-identified as African-American, he or she was held to a much lower bar and then we have, this gets a little technical, but each service academy has a prep school where they can send people who meet no bars whatsoever. And then they declare them remediated and they send them to Annapolis. So I thought that was racist and I thought it was illegal. I mean, the Supreme Court, as you're aware, has just killed affirmative action for civilian colleges,

but it's made an exception, a specific exception for the service academies. So we can continue to let in students based on race. So I objected to that. And I started writing about it and I was punished. So that was point number one. Then we got the sexual assault training wave where the Obama administration defined Title IX as a way to punish men who women had said had assaulted them. And assault was very broad. It was, you know, the man might have thought it was consensual sex. But if the woman decided even months later that she felt pressure or she didn't do it willingly or she thought about it and it wasn't a good idea and so on, the man could be slapped with all sorts of punishments. At the service academies, they can actually be thrown in jail with military punishments.

It's not a slap on the wrist. So that's what I mean by the culture wars were being imposed on us and rammed through. So the third thing is the current kerfuffle, if you want, of what's called DEI, DIRC, Divers equity, and inclusion, which means proactively looking for ways to hire people who are members of what's sometimes called marginalized groups, which means, of course, non-white people, to begin with. Women are not the flavor of the month either. They were 20 years ago. Everything was about inclusivity for women, but that's kind of fallen off the front burner. So now it's non-white people and it's non-straight sexualities. It sounds good to say, oh,

we're opening up to other groups, but that means that you're not letting in people who probably had higher predictors. So it's the same old toxic stew of, you know, race, gender, and sexuality, only it's imposed with this greater force. These are bad because, well, for example, the racial profiling that they're engaged in, it sets students against each other. Most of our kids do not come in as racist, but a lot of them realize that, you know, the black kids, are being given leadership positions who were less qualified than the white ones who didn't. It's either or. It's a zero-sum case.

So it creates tension in the ranks. And you can say tension at, I don't know, Harvard, which of course is everybody's talking about these days, is par for the course. But tension in the military, setting groups against each other, is lethal because the point of the military is to have unified action. And what we're doing is creating dissension in the ranks. So my commitment is not just to teaching an English class the way I would be teaching at the University of Maryland or Johns Hopkins. It's to be preparing future officers.

Once again, that's the subtitle of my book to make thinking officers. You need thinking officers who don't react in a knee-jerk way. They're under pressure situation, maybe even battle. The bullets are flying. They have to look at all of the data and take the best course of action, not necessarily the unimpeachable. course of action because there probably isn't one, but the best course of action. And not only does that help us win wars, which incidentally we haven't done for the last 75 years, it keeps their people alive. I mean, only 10% of the military is composed of officers, and 90% of them are the enlisted. So if you have

officers that can't be flexible and come in with prejudices or unable to take into account data that they don't want to take into account, people die. And we lose wars, even at a bigger rate and a faster rate and in a bigger way than we currently are. So these culture wars are bad for the service academies. They're bad for the military. It's not just the service academies. It's the military as a whole. It really is going down the wrong path with this stuff. And I'm trying to say, wait, wait, talk about this. Let's talk about, look, I have. I've taught between 3,000 and 4,000 students. Hundreds of them have sat in the big red chair in my office and told me what they think of the place.

They're all almost to a person. They're disillusioned. And I know what the problems are. Who doesn't know what the problems are? The answer is the administration. I am indicative of the inability of the military to listen to people who can actually see what the effects of these disastrous policies are. So I'm worried. I mean, I'm a taxpayer.

I want a strong military. This isn't about me. And it isn't even really about the service academies. It's about the military. You know, I say when you drop a pebble in the Severn River, we're on the Severn River, it makes concentric circles. The closest circles in, you know, my story. It's kind of a memoir, my book, the Naval Academy.

But then as the circles grow larger, it's the military at large. And then finally, it's these culture wars. It feels as if the United States is one half of it is at the throats of the other half. So the solution is, you know, put down the pitchforks and let's talk about this. You're saying we're going down the wrong path. Do you believe there's a path back? Do you actually see that happening? What's the mechanism for that?

Well, the mechanism for it happening at Annapolis would have been for them to get off of my back and, you know, let professors do their jobs at Annapolis. Of course, there is a problem here. You say, you know, basically, what do I want to do about it? The more noise I make, the more possible it is that some of the officers who are in there will begin to echo me. I don't know whether it's going to change Harvard, but if you start, again, to go back to the ripples, if you work the ripples from big to small rather than small to big, if we can change the service academy so that they are actually what they say they are, and encourage open discussion in the military so that junior officers are not afraid of taking

unwelcome information to their superiors, which currently, in my experience, and talking with former students, they are. The brass don't want to hear what they don't want to hear. We would have not only stronger service academies, but a more effective military. Right now, the problem is that the U.S. military is, you know, you can get all hooya, say, well, it's the greatest in the world, but it's the greatest in the world to the extent that people keep their heads and don't fall into this trap of kissing the behind of the level above them. The culture of the military's got to change. Now it's about keeping the CEO happy and up the chain to the point where the superintendent of the Naval Academy doesn't know what's going on.

There's a joke that says that when you become an admiral, you never eat a bad meal and you never hear the truth because there are all these layers, all these buffer layers of subordinate officers who are, each one is afraid to tell unpleasant truths to the level above it. And I say, look, I never told students what to think. My goal was to show them how to think, because when they graduate and go into the service, as they climb the ranks, they're going to be in positions where the buck stops with them. And they have to make decisions. So they have to look at all the data, they have to be able to justify what they do. They can't just go with their gut instinct, although obviously in the middle of battle with the bullets flying, that's pretty much all you have

left. But you can train your gut instinct to listen to what the other side is saying. And that's exactly what the Naval Academy and increasingly the military refuses to do. They don't want to listen to people who are raining on their parade. Now there does seem to be a groundswell against D-E-I forming, so we'll see if that starts to catch on in the academies. Bruce, thank you so much for talking with us. Okay, thanks a whole lot. That was Bruce Fleming, former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, an author of Saving Our Service Academies, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.