Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Military Academy at West Point cannot require civilian professors to get approval before speaking at certain outside engagements, a federal judge ruled last week.
- U.S. District Judge Cathy Seibel also banned West Point from enforcing an informal policy barring civilian faculty from sharing personal opinions during instruction.
- Her ruling makes permanent a May order that temporarily blocked the military academy's policies amid a lawsuit from a civilian professor.
Dive Insight:
During the first month of his second term, President Donald Trump ordered military colleges to ban “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” certain views his administration deemed “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational.”
Soon thereafter, West Point leadership issued an institutional memo requiring faculty to obtain departmental approval for any outside engagements at which they would identify as West Point professors and talk about their “disciplinary areas of expertise."
West Point professor Tim Bakken, a civilian who has taught law at the military academy since 2000, sued over the policy last September. In his complaint, he alleged it was part of an institutional effort to “control, chill and suppress faculty speech.”
Bakken also said that Shane Reeves, then the dean of West Point’s academic board, told faculty it was wrong to share personal opinions or “advocate for a particular position or ideology” when teaching students — an allegation that West Point did not refute in court filings.
Reeves, who has since become the president of the University of Wyoming, is also facing a lawsuit over allegations he stifled instruction about climate change while at West Point via faculty retaliation.
Both the formal policy and Reeves' directive violated the First Amendment rights of civilian faculty, Seibel wrote in her Sept. 8 ruling.
This month's legal victory is not the first Bakken has won against West Point. A federal judge in 2012 ruled that the military academy had retaliated against Bakken for reporting hiring and pay discrepancies between retired military officers and qualified civilian candidates.
