Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a blunt response after a West Point philosophy professor announced his resignation on Thursday and criticized the academy for changing its education principles to match the “ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”
In a New York Times op-ed, West Point philosophy professor Graham Parsons announced on Thursday that he would be resigning from West Point after teaching at the military academy for 13 years.
Parsons wrote, “I will be resigning after this semester from my tenured position at West Point after 13 years on the faculty.” The professor added, “I cannot tolerate these changes, which prevent me from doing my job responsibly. I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.”
In response to the announcement that Parsons would be resigning from his position at West Point, Hegseth tweeted, “You will not be missed Professor Parsons.”
As part of his op-ed in the New York Times, Parsons accused the Trump administration of making major changes to the “core principles” of West Point.
READ MORE: Trump orders Hegseth, Bondi to consider use of military for domestic operations
“In a matter of days, the United States Military Academy at West Point abandoned its core principles,” Parsons wrote. “Once a school that strove to give cadets the broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education they need for careers as Army officers, it was suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.”
Parsons argued in his op-ed that the Trump administration’s policies have led to a “sweeping assault on the school’s curriculum and the faculty members’ research.”
The West Point professor’s resignation and op-ed against changes at the military academy come after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January that prohibited the Department of Defense and any military education institutions from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” curriculum and theories that are “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational,” such as “gender ideology,” “divisive concepts,” “race or sex stereotyping,” and theories that “America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.”
Trump’s executive order also directed military institutions to “teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
