The supersize black Sharpie is what gives it away. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to stop awarding tenure to civilian professors at the military academies ends with a huge, jagged signature—an homage, perhaps, to that of the president—the size of two of the paragraphs above. With the same instrument, he also underlined, word by word, two key sentences that are as blunt as the message they are intended to deliver and the mind that conceived them.
In appearance and tone, the document reminds one of the kind of note that a really steamed preteen, grounded because of poor classroom behavior, drops on his father’s or mother’s dinner plate before stamping upstairs. It is all temper.
Hegseth did not strip current faculty at the military academies (including West Point, the Naval Academy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy) of tenure, though he no doubt would have liked to. That probably would have failed in court, like so many of the administration’s efforts to punish people it dislikes or at least shove them into obscurity. But the language, the tone, and the angry scrawl tell us much about the mindset of the civilian head of our armed forces as he strikes another blow against the educational dimension of military preparedness.
To be sure, academic tenure has its critics. In the popular imagination, sinecured professors live on easy street, but that is rarely the case. Professors at top-notch institutions (such as the service academies) are a highly self-motivated lot who continue to churn out research after receiving tenure, because that is why they joined a relatively low-paying profession. Moreover, tenured professors still have to teach to a certain standard, still can get fired for all kinds of misdeeds, and still are subject to the artifices employed by deans everywhere to nudge them off of faculties—zeroed-out pay increases and travel budgets, unappetizing and onerous committee assignments, buy-outs, and above all, cramped, windowless offices coupled with in-person attendance mandates.
The legitimate case against tenure is different. The system can preserve in amber fields that are obsolete, artificial, or merely tendentious. It can also keep faculty stale by slowing down the intake of young talent, and in some cases, tolerating mediocre but just-acceptable classroom performance.
[From the September 2026 Issue: Pete Hegseth, you call that a pull-up?]
But tenure does preserve intellectual independence from the fads of any field: You cannot get rid of that historian of Rome just because you prefer someone who does something trendier. It also protects faculty engaged in deep, long-term, and consequential works of scholarship and research. The alternative is a system that encourages the continual production of superficial and conventional work. And above all, tenure protects the unpopular, the controversial, and the ornery freethinker from the tyranny of student, staff, or faculty mobs on the left or the right—or, in this case, from a government that actively hates its critics.
Military education is still education—a point that Hegseth fails to understand. It seeks to develop disciplined, curious, insightful thinkers. The service academies do not, in any meaningful way, teach tactics. They are there to educate young officers, admittedly emphasizing some qualities that get a lighter touch in civilian institutions.
Only a poorly educated person would think that civilians, including tenured professors, have no role in this endeavor. The best anthology of writing about leadership I know of was produced by a West Point professor—someone with nary a day of military service—who also edited a fantastic edition of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Men and women who are going to be officers will learn as much about what leadership entails from Shakespeare, or classes in cognitive psychology or ancient history, as they will from a perusal of field manuals.
Civilian faculty at the service academies, as at staff colleges and war colleges, provide depth and expertise that their military counterparts simply cannot. They are more likely to go somewhat against the grain of military life and cultural assumptions—and that is a good thing. There is a peculiar blindness, or worse, hypocrisy, in an administration that denounces (with reason) the ideological homogeneity of many university faculties, while at the same time attempting to enforce a similar outcome by different means in the armed forces.
Diversity of mindset, background, and professional formation are essential to a military that is state-of-the-art, open to oddball ideas and personalities, and able to think, as the cliché has it, outside the box. Could one get these benefits without tenure? In theory, yes, but for better or worse, tenure is the coin of the realm among ambitious young professors, a mark of respect and recognition of achievement.
The bigger message that Hegseth is sending, and intends to send, is that civilian faculty are unwelcome in the Department of Defense. His argument consists of a chest-pounding, tough-guy emphasis on “lethality”—his cant word of choice—that has no bearing on what military leadership really is. The latter is more likely to be found in the large and well-thumbed libraries of leaders such as Generals Jim Mattis and David Petraeus, and Admirals James Stavridis and William McRaven—readers and thinkers whose imagination and understanding of the military profession extend far beyond the Hegsethian conception of push-ups, pull-ups, and annual testosterone tests.
[Missy Ryan: The Top Gun: Maverick theory of Pete Hegseth]
Hegsethian thinking, if that is the right word, has permeated the senior ranks of officers and officials in some of these institutions. In a particularly egregious act, the Air Force Academy has removed the word educate from its mission. This is a step backward worthy of a caveman in a G suit—someone who thinks that fancy weapons and aggressiveness guarantee victory. It is the mindset of someone who has learned nothing from the American military failures that now stretch back to Vietnam, and will produce more such in the future.
This period will not last forever. In two years, quite possibly less, Hegseth will be gone, and with him the memory of the worst civilian leader of the American military since John Floyd in 1860, who, as a Confederate general (of the kind that Hegseth chooses to honor), was a traitor. But Hegseth’s legacy will have to be rooted out.
If a moderate Republican, or more likely a Democratic, presidential administration comes to power in January 2029, its reconstruction of the Defense Department will require more than restoring the old names on buildings and changing the names of forts back to those that Americans can in decency honor. The new team will need to survey and repair the damage that has been done to the military’s intellectual infrastructure, which is considerable and, in some ways, more consequential than the damage Iranian missiles have done to America’s unprotected bases in the Persian Gulf.
A restored American military will need to reckon—severely—with the leaders and senior officials who, inspired by this secretary, are taking their own initiatives to make the armed services stupider by doing things such as changing the Air Force Academy’s mission statement, harassing or firing civilian faculty, and failing to stand up for intellectual freedom. One hopes that someone will have been keeping track of these officials’ names and assignments, because they are doing a profound disservice to the young men and women in uniform and to the country they serve. They, and not a few civilian professors of English literature, are the ones the defense department can do without.
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