In honor of Veterans Day, we at the National Association of Scholars would like to extend our most heartfelt “thank you” to the brave men and women who serve and protect our nation.
 

While the majority of the nation has off today from school or work to commemorate this holiday, this question was rattling around in my head, how many Americans truly understand what that means? Academia has long failed to teach civics, history, and military history effectively, eroding patriotism at every level of education. In honor of our military, I’d like to explore this decline—along with the rise of woke ideology in our service academies—and discuss what can be done to reverse it.
 

In 2008, NAS published a symposium of sorts in our Spring issue of Academic Questions (AQ). In this issue, contributors offered their thoughts on the decline of military history within academia. For instance, Josiah Bunting III writes, 
 

The decline of military history in universities reflects an indulged hatred of war and armies (now identified, as they should not be, with ‘conservatism’—another slipshod judgment), and of military people as not clever or, if clever, perverse in the vocation to which they devote their intellectual talents. It reflects the wide cultural chasm between academia and the American military, a chasm never deeper or wider than now, in the thirty-fifth year of the all-volunteer military. 

While John A. Lynn II comments on the long-term preservation strategy, 
 

While a strategy for anchoring the field of military history concerns me most, in the long run what should concern us all is promoting and preserving historical studies in their full range. A limited selection of fashionable approaches to history studied in isolation is by its very nature a distortion. We gain by broad inclusion, not by narrow exclusion. Should the study of the conduct of war and military institutions be lost as a serious historical subdiscipline, it is not simply military historians who lose; it is all of us.

These are just two of many articles from that issue of AQ to quote—published 17 years ago but still strikingly relevant today. Colleges and universities should teach military history alongside the liberal arts, with professors serving as careful stewards of Western civilization’s cultural legacy. Educated Americans ought to understand the military’s role in our nation’s story, both on and off the battlefield. As Peter Wood suggests, this begins with reconciling “the necessary martial qualities of the soldier with the no less necessary qualities needed to participate in a civic order,” encouraging academia to engage more deeply with questions of war, peace, and our civilizational heritage.
 

When we lose this, we see the invasion of far-left ideology and those who desire the fall of Western civilization into not only higher education, but our military academies themselves. 
 

I recently corresponded with a naval midshipman who recounted his firsthand experiences with “diversity, equity, and inclusion”(DEI) and other left-leaning ideologies at the Naval Academy from 2021–24. A few things he shared struck a chord: the entire Brigade was required to watch a “microaggressions” training video, making students hyperaware of acceptable language and framing in professional and academic settings; one professor explicitly urged white midshipmen to “understand their privilege” (paraphrased); and while dissenting from prevailing ideology was tolerated in private, students risked not being considered for leadership positions if they did so publicly or in official contexts.
 

What can be done? 
 

Colleges and universities should place more emphasis on teaching what military history means within the lens of our nation’s history, as well as more broadly, for Western civilization. This could mean hiring a professor specifically for such courses, or even requiring such a course within a core curriculum. Perhaps students should even be required to have conversations with our veterans as part of their coursework, learning from their experiences and perspectives serving in the military. As for the military academies, a purge of DEI from the culture and classrooms is imperative—the Trump administration is already working on this as well as restoring merit-based admissions standards.
 

By no means is this an exhaustive list, but it could be a start to pull back the anti-American and anti-Western sentiment blanketing academia, and reinstill a deeper appreciation for war and peace, our military and its history. 
 

Until next week.

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