Regarding the Feb. 6 Washington Post magazine article “Making waves,” about Carolyn Chun, a U.S. Naval Academy professor denied tenure because, as she believes, she is a female woman of color.

The USNA has created a perfect storm. It has internalized intense pressure from Congress to hire and retain non-White-non-male-non-straight faculty members for a student body that is overwhelmingly White, straight, male and conservative. Such hires typically feel defensive about the large numbers of skeptical male students they encounter. The result is that they frequently alienate the typical USNA student, and this comes out in student evaluations, which are subjective.

However, the USNA brass, which has no experience with higher education and is using a top-down authority model for an academic environment, wants to retain these student opinion forms to deal with people such as me. About 15 years after I started teaching English at the USNA in 1987, I began to write critically about the academy. USNA officials fired me. But if they use these forms with people such as Ms. Chun, whom they need to retain for the current political program, the result will be more bad publicity.

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In my situation, they used the complaints of a right-wing student that I had advocated positions he didn’t like (such as changing the no-sex-on-campus policy of USNA) as a pretense to fire me. USNA’s allegation was that I failed to “respect” the students. A judge for the Merit Systems Protection Board threw out every one of its allegations, finding that the student was trying to get revenge for a grade lower than he thought he deserved. For the administration, anything that squelches dissent is justified.

Ms. Chun should know that tenure doesn’t ensure anything at the USNA. I have it and was fired anyway, before being reinstated. The USNA is not primarily an academic institution; it’s a vanity project of the brass that costs the taxpayers a bundle and produces fewer than 1 in 5 new naval officers.

The service academies are in a bind they have themselves created between authority and wokeness and should be repurposed to military graduate schools for technical subjects.

Bruce E. Fleming, Davidsonville

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