Hegseth Says Tenure Breeds Complacency: The Naval Academy Has 217 Tenured Civilians.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed the military departments to immediately stop appointing civilian faculty to tenured positions at the US service academies, in a one-page memo signed Tuesday arguing that tenure produces academic stagnation and drifts curricula away from warfighting. The directive does not remove tenure from faculty who already hold it, and does not specify what employment structure replaces it. It reverses a position the academies' own leaders defended before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2025, when the superintendents of West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy each described tenure as a tool for recruiting and retaining civilian faculty. The Naval Academy has 217 tenured civilian professors and 67 more on tenure track.

What the memo says

The document runs to a single page and is titled "Refocusing the Military Service Academies on Warfighter Education."

"The primary purpose of our Military Service Academies is to prepare the next generation of officers to lead the men and women of the greatest military on Earth," Hegseth wrote. "To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on this warfighting mission, we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality."

His case against tenure is set out in two parts.

The first is institutional. Tenure, he wrote, contributes to "academic stagnation, faculty complacency, and institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs."

The second is about content. Tenure, in his account, "contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics."

In place of tenure, the military departments are directed to develop hiring plans prioritising "institutional flexibility and faculty contribution to the warfighting mission."

The Department's own announcement framed it as continuing reform of its educational institutions "to ensure they remain laser-focused on lethality and readiness."

What the memo does not say

Two gaps, and they are the practical substance of the story.

It does not remove tenure from anyone who currently holds it. The directive applies to future appointments. On present reporting, the 217 tenured professors at Annapolis keep their status.

It does not say what replaces tenure. No employment structure is specified for newly hired civilian faculty, no implementation timeline is given, and the departments are left to develop their own hiring plans. West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy did not immediately respond to questions, and Pentagon officials offered no further detail when approached.

That matters because the terms offered to a new hire determine whether the academies can attract the people they want. A three-year renewable contract and a career appointment are different propositions to a scholar weighing an offer, and until the departments publish their plans nobody knows which one is on the table.

What the academies told Congress last year

Here is the part that has gone almost entirely unreported, and it is on the public record.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March 2025, the serving heads of all three academies were asked about civilian faculty tenure.

Lieutenant General Steven Gilland, superintendent of West Point, said tenure gives civilian faculty opportunities to advance within their disciplines.

Vice Admiral Yvette Davids, superintendent of the Naval Academy, described tenure as both a recruiting tool and an incentive for civilian faculty to stay.

Lieutenant General Tony Bauernfeind, superintendent of the Air Force Academy, said tenure formed part of the academic progression for civilian faculty.

None of the three was arguing about academic freedom in the abstract. All three were making a workforce argument: this is how we get good people and keep them.

Eighteen months later, the structure they described has been closed to new appointments by the Secretary. Whether the superintendents' assessment has changed, or whether they were overruled, is not addressed in the memo and none of the academies has commented.

One academy has already been doing this

The obvious question about any policy is whether it works, and unusually, there is a live test.

The Air Force Academy has historically not granted conventional academic tenure to civilian professors. It has instead used three-to-five-year renewable contracts.

So one of the three academies has been operating the model Hegseth is now imposing across all of them, for years, and its superintendent still described tenure-track structures as part of civilian faculty academic progression at that 2025 hearing.

That makes the Air Force Academy the natural place to look for evidence. How has retention compared with Annapolis and West Point? Has the contract model affected the quality or seniority of applicants? Does the curriculum look measurably more focused on warfighting?

Those questions have answers somewhere in the Academy's own personnel data. Nobody covering this story is asking them, and the Department's announcement does not cite the Air Force Academy's experience as precedent.

Hegseth directs military service academies to immediately stop giving tenure to civilian professors https://t.co/UTp0niefva

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 30, 2026

How much of the faculty this touches

The proportion of civilian faculty varies considerably between the three institutions.

The Naval Academy is the most affected: roughly half of its approximately 600 faculty members are civilians, with 217 tenured civilian professors and 67 on tenure track.

West Point reports around 27% civilian faculty against 73% military.

The Air Force Academy already operates without conventional tenure.

Academies hire civilians primarily to cover disciplines military officers do not study in the course of their careers English, the humanities, and specialised academic fields where a serving officer would be unlikely to hold a doctorate.

Eric Merriam, a legal studies and political science professor at the University of Central Florida and a former Air Force Academy professor, noted that civilian faculty often bring more teaching experience and stronger academic credentials than their military counterparts at the academies.

Congress expanded the academies' ability to employ civilian faculty through legislation enacted in 1992, so the civilian presence is a deliberate policy choice of long standing rather than an accretion.

The case against

Tenure's defenders make an argument that is narrower than it is often assumed to be.

Traditionally, a tenured professor can only be dismissed in extreme circumstances such as professional misconduct or genuine financial emergency. The purpose of that protection is that a scholar can pursue and publish conclusions that are unpopular with an administration, a donor, or a public without their livelihood depending on the answer.

Advocates argue that protection matters most precisely where subjects are contested, and point to current controversy over scholarly treatment of history, race, gender and sexuality.

Merriam characterised the decision as a retrenchment, saying it was "a retreat from what I think was positive progress in ensuring that these elite educational academies actually have elite education as part of the program."

Reporting on the decision has situated it within a broader conservative effort to curtail tenure in American higher education, campaigns frequently presented as a means of checking academics with liberal views. Hegseth said last year that his goal was to remove what he called "woke" civilian professors from the institutions and replace them with military personnel.

The counterargument, made in the memo itself, is that the service academies are not ordinary universities. They exist to produce officers, they are funded to do that, and the protections appropriate to a civilian research institution may not be appropriate to one whose graduates are commissioned into the armed forces. That is a real argument, and it is the one Hegseth is making.

What happens next

The departments' hiring plans. Until those are published, the practical effect on recruitment is unknown. That is the document to watch for.

Whether Congress responds. The legislative framework enabling civilian faculty dates from 1992, and the Senate Armed Services Committee has taken evidence on tenure at the academies as recently as last year. A policy reversing the position its own witnesses described is the kind of thing that draws a hearing.

Retention. Current tenure holders keep their status, but the signal sent to a mid-career civilian academic at Annapolis is not neutral. Departures over the next two years will be the measurable outcome.

The academies' own response. All three declined to comment immediately. If any superintendent addresses the change publicly, that will be the most consequential thing said about it.