West Point professor resigns over education shift under Trump

Source: The Guardian

Thu 8 May 2025 13.45 EDT
Last modified on Thu 8 May 2025 15.14 EDT


A West Point philosophy professor has announced his resignation after 13 years on the faculty, citing the academy’s rapid shift away from its core educational principles under the Trump administration in an essay for the New York Times. Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy at the US Military Academy at West Point, criticized the institution for “failing to provide an adequate education for the cadets” under the new administration.

“I cannot tolerate these changes, which prevent me from doing my job responsibly,” he wrote in the essay. “I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.”

He goes on to say that West Point began censoring its curriculum to align with the administration’s ideological preferences following Donald Trump’s executive order and a memo from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. These directives prohibited instruction on so-called “un-American” theories, including gender ideology and any suggestion that “America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.” As a result, Parsons says West Point administrators began an aggressive overhaul of the curriculum.

Faculty were pressured to revise or eliminate courses dealing with race, gender and power dynamics. Classes such as “Topics in Gender History”, “Race, Ethnicity, Nation,” and “Power and Difference” were removed. The sociology major as well as a Black history project at the history department were both discontinued. He added that influential authors such as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker were removed from syllabi and a student debate team was instructed not to explore certain positions at a competition.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/08/west-point-resignation-trump