Philosopher Resigns from Naval War College in Protest of Trump’s & Hegseth’s Policies
Pauline M. Shanks Kaurin, a philosopher specializing in military ethics, just war theory, and applied ethics, has resigned from her position as the Admiral James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics at the Naval War College (Newport, Rhode Island), because she believes that “the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible.”
According to The Atlantic, Shanks-Kaurin, who joined the Naval War College in 2018, “orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth… have made staying both morally and practically untenable.”
Of particular concern was Trump’s January 27th, 2025 Executive Order that, among other things, issued the following prohibitions and requirements:
(a) The Department of Defense and the Armed Forces, including any educational institution operated or controlled thereby, are prohibited from promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories:
(i) “divisive concepts,” as defined in section 3(c) of this order, and “race or sex stereotyping,” or “race or sex scapegoating” as both terms are defined in section 2 of Executive Order 13950, as amended;
(ii) that America’s founding documents are racist or sexist; and
(iii) “gender ideology,” as defined in section 3(b) of this order.
(b) The Department of Defense and the Armed Forces shall not hire employees, contractors, or consultants to teach the theories set forth in subsection (a) of this section.
(c) The Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall carefully review the leadership, curriculum, and instructors of the United States Service Academies and other defense academic institutions associated with their respective Departments to ensure alignment with this order. In addition, these institutions shall be required [!] to teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.
According to The Atlantic:
At first, Pauline was cautious. She knew that her work in the field of military ethics could be controversial—particularly on the issues of oaths and obedience. In the military, where discipline and the chain of command rule daily life, investigating the meaning of oath-taking and obedience is a necessary but touchy exercise. The military is sworn to obey all legal orders, but when that obedience becomes absolute, the results can be ghastly: Pauline wrote her doctoral dissertation at Temple University on oaths, obedience, and the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a young U.S. officer and his men believed that their orders allowed them to slay hundreds of unarmed civilians. For more than 20 years, she taught these matters in the philosophy department at Pacific Lutheran University, and once at Newport, she wrote a book on the contrasting notions of obedience in military and civilian life.
When the Trump order came down, Pauline told me that Naval War College administrators gave her “vague assurances” that the college would not interfere with ongoing work by her or other faculty, or with academic freedom in general. But one day, shortly after the executive order in January, she was walking through the main lobby, which proudly features display cases with books by the faculty, and she noticed that a volume on LGBTQ issues in the military had vanished. The disappearance of that book led Pauline to seek more clarity from the college’s administration about nonpartisanship, and especially about academic freedom…
During an all-hands meeting with senior college leaders in February, Pauline said that she and other Naval War College faculty were told that the college would comply with Hegseth’s directives and that, in Pauline’s words, “if we were thinking we had academic freedom in our scholarship and in the classroom, we were mistaken.” (Other faculty present at the meeting confirmed to me that they interpreted the message from the college’s leadership the same way; one of them later told me that the implication was that the Defense Department could now rule any subject out of bounds for classroom discussion or scholarly research at will.) Pauline said there were audible gasps in the room, and such visible anger that it seemed to her that even the administrators hosting the meeting were taken aback. “I’ve been in academia for 31 years,” she told me, and that gathering “was the most horrifying meeting I’ve ever been a part of.”
…the institution now apparently expected her and other faculty to self-censor in the classroom and preemptively bowdlerize their own research. “I don’t do DEI work,” she said, “but I do moral philosophy, and now I can’t do it. I’d have to take out discussions of race and gender and not do philosophy as I think it should be done.”
You can read more here.
(via Marshall Abrams and Patrick Lin)
Related:
“West Point Philosophy Professor Resigns After Trump’s Incursions on Academic Freedom”
“When to Be a Hero“
What a ridiculous executive order.
Questions for those who know better than I:
Does the diction of the order leave any legal room here? I’m looking at
and at
Specifically I’m wondering: Can one present these “bad” theories without “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” them? And can already hired employees present these “bad” theories (without endorsing them in the classroom)?
Or is the presentation of a theory by a respected professor always going to be taken as something more than mere presentation simply in virtue of the professor’s being a professor (i.e., in a position of power relative to students)?
Unfortunately, I think it’s moot. Maybe the Naval War College could have interpreted the EO that way, but it seems clear from Professor Shanks-Kaurin’s report that they’re not interpreting it that way.
I appreciate your replying, but it was fairly clear to me that the College is not interpreting it that way, and thus that my question has little immediate relevance.
I’m more interested in the legal viability of a certain reading. And in what legal scholars know (and I don’t) that forecloses the viability of that reading.
And, secondarily, I’m interested in the pragmatics (I guess you’d call it?) of the presentation and exploration of a view. Because it seems to me that there’s an important difference between presentation and endorsement, a difference too often ignored.
But I’m prepared to accept that my asking these less actionable questions is navel-gazing.
A hugely difficult situation, and I applaud Prof. Shanks Kaurin for her integrity. However, I do wonder if the right approach here is disengagement (a la a complicity morality logic), instead of strategic engagement. (It doesn’t seem to me the choice is as simple as “Salute and execute—or resign”).
It’s an odd state of affairs when the apt response to unethical actions by an institution (or its higher-up’s) is…an exodus of the institution’s ethicists. I bet Hegseth relishes the departure of the ethicists (and other faculty, as quoted in the Atlantic), and this outcome is precisely one desired outcome of the policies.
Of course, it’s easy to ask questions from afar, and I recognize a philosopher has personal reasons not to have to deal with all of that, or have their work limited in a way that makes themselves feel no longer to be a philosopher. So, I once again applaud the professor for reacting in courageous way, consonant with her conscience.
In this choice, Professor Shanks-Kaurin exemplifies the kind of integrity valued and promoted by the namesake of her Professorship: Admiral James B. Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war for seven years. I often assign his essay The World of Epictetus (https://stoicbreviary.blogspot.com/p/text-james-b-stockdale-world-of.html) to my students.
There’s much in that essay that is relevant to our current crisis, but here’s something that stands out to me: “The one thing I came to realize was that if you don’t lose integrity you can’t be had and you can’t be hurt. Compromises multiply and build up when you’re working against a skilled extortionist or a good manipulator. You can’t be had if you don’t take that first shortcut, or “meet them halfway,” as they say, or look for that tacit “deal,” or make that first compromise.”
Thank you, Professor Shanks-Kaurin.