30-Year Naval Academy Teacher Details Depth Of DEI Rot In America’s Military Institutions

This Book Exposes The DEI Rot Plaguing U.S. Military Academies

In "Saving Our Service Academies," Bruce Fleming documents how the Naval Academy's military bureaucracy is…

The Federalist

‘The Naval Academy tries to square the circle by both bragging about its standards and letting in half the class to lower standards.’

It’s no secret the Biden administration has “reimagined” the U.S. military into a left-wing social experiment. From employing enlisted drag queens to boost recruitment to using taxpayer funds to host LGBT “pride” events on military installations, America’s supreme fighting force has prioritized promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) racism over addressing the biggest challenges hampering U.S. military readiness.

A recently released book unveils how this leftist ideology is also infecting the military’s service academies. In Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers, author and professor Bruce Fleming documents the pervasiveness of DEI throughout the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) and shows how the institution’s cookie-cutter bureaucracy is crippling individuality among the school’s midshipmen.

During his over 30-year teaching career at the institution, Fleming served (for a time) on the USNA Admissions Board, which evaluates applicants and decides which are ultimately admitted into the school. While on the board, he allegedly discovered that — like many civilian colleges — the academy considers applicants’ race throughout the admissions process and accepts nonwhite applicants who don’t meet the school’s academic requirements. Fleming claims that “[a]pplicants who self-identified as a member of a race the Academy wished to privilege … were briefed separately to the committee not by a white member but by a minority Navy lieutenant.”

“The choices are simple. If you want students who look a certain way but tend to score lower than others, you accept the lower scores and stop talking about your standards. Or you go with the class that can meet these standards and stop talking about the way they look,” Fleming writes. “The Naval Academy tries to square the circle by both bragging about its standards and letting in half the class to lower standards.”

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the use of race-based admissions, or “affirmative action,” by institutions of higher education is unconstitutional. That decision did not, however, address the use of such policies by U.S. military academies. Students for Fair Admissions — the plaintiff in the aforementioned SCOTUS decision — filed lawsuits against West Point and the Naval Academy over their race-based admissions policies in September and October, respectively…