After Trump’s order, West Point curbed faculty speech. One professor said no.
Tim Bakken argues that the government’s attempt to stifle what teachers can say and write makes the military more susceptible to bad decisions.
The Washington Post reports:
By Hannah Natanson:
NYACK, N.Y. — The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school’s new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him.
Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. “This violates the First Amendment,” he said, predicting an end to West Point’s professed tolerance for opposing views.
Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn’t want to hear it. “Stop talking,” Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, “and sit down.”
Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. “It’s like how military officers must not follow illegal orders —” he began to say.
“We’re a military institution,” Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. “We follow orders.”
President Donald Trump assumed power for the second time with an ambitious agenda to reshape norms and policies across government and throughout the private sector. His administration has moved swiftly to undo diversity initiatives that proliferated in prior years, reshape how U.S. history is taught in museums and parks, and assert a greater federal role in how universities hire and manage their funding.
To the president’s supporters, these efforts represent an overdue reset for liberal policies that had veered out of control. To many other Americans, they amount to ideological, and sometimes unconstitutional, overreach. In little more than 18 months, the administration has drawn a surge of lawsuits alleging violations of civil liberties or other essential freedoms, a Washington Post analysis of hundreds of thousands of court records found.
One of those was filed by Bakken.
His confrontation with the colonel that day in March 2025 brought the clash to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the emerald-green-and-granite campus on the Hudson River that trains the leaders of tomorrow’s Army. Since World War II, West Point had fostered academic openness, advancing the view that dissenting opinions are crucial in forming sound military judgments. But Trump and his top lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argue that West Point must prize patriotic obedience to authority above all else.
Seven days into his second presidency, Trump issued an executive order forbidding military colleges like West Point from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” ideas that his administration deemed “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational.” It also required teaching that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
Within weeks, West Point’s dean introduced a revised “academic engagement” policy, stipulating that the school’s nearly 700 professors — roughly a third of whom are civilians — must seek approval from their department head before they could deliver a speech, publish a paper or even speak on a podcast.
Bakken had never needed such approval before, he said. One of the first civilian professors hired at West Point, he had taught criminal and constitutional law there since 2000.
Nonmilitary faculty were meant to improve West Point’s intellectual rigor and provide an outside perspective. Many uniformed colleagues never fully embraced their presence, however. Bakken, whose colleagues and students described him as a principled but brusque contrarian with a penchant for criticism, had often felt isolated.
Now, listening to the colonel’s words about “following orders,” Bakken felt alone in the room once again.
He had long argued that a military culture of unquestioning obedience, coupled with an aversion to criticism and a sense of superiority, had caused the U.S. to lose every war it fought since 1945. “Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial,” he wrote in a 2020 book, “The Cost of Loyalty.” “I have been living at the headwaters.”
West Point officials hadn’t liked that book, or much of Bakken’s criticism. But they had never tried to silence him, he said — until Trump’s second presidency, when West Point revised its faculty speech rules.
“Men and women die because other men and women do not have the reasoning, or the ability, or the courage to speak truthfully.”
— Excerpt from Tim Bakken's book "The Cost of Loyalty"
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth, a former Army major and weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends,” said West Point shouldn’t employ civilian professors, calling them “left-wing” and “woke.” In office, he later told cadets that the academy had “hired professors who advocated for anti-American ideologies right here in these halls. But no more.”
West Point’s new policy came as Bakken prepared a new book that, like his first, criticized the academy and the military. But he was unwilling to seek permission to publish it, not from West Point, and not from Hegseth’s Pentagon.
In September, he sued West Point in federal court. The “intent and effect” of his employer’s new policy, he contended, “is to chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, the Army, the Defense Department, Hegseth and Trump.
A spokesperson for West Point declined to answer a list of questions, writing in an email that, “as a matter of policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation.” Various West Point employees declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell likewise declined to comment, citing Bakken’s ongoing lawsuit. But he wrote in a statement that Hegseth “completely supports” Trump’s executive order. Referring to Bakken, Parnell added: “We are not concerned by the half-baked thoughts of a disgruntled individual.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly answer questions about speech by Bakken or other professors at West Point, writing in an email that “individuals who refuse to follow the sacred chain-of-command … threaten the lives of our warfighters. Such reckless and dangerous actions will not be tolerated.”
Although Bakken filed his lawsuit on behalf of civilian faculty, he saw it as protecting the rights of all professors. But they didn’t seem to agree.
After the suit, many stopped speaking to him, he said. His three closest colleagues confided that they’d like to help but their wives wouldn’t allow it. One of his oldest friends, who had started at West Point the same day he did, asked him to reconsider.
“This policy is good for us,” Bakken recalled him saying. “It will prevent us from saying things that get us in trouble.”
Bakken spends many of his hours at home working from a bare-bones black desk, tucked in a corner of his bedroom. (Paola Chapdelaine/For The Washington Post)
Bakken arrived at West Point as a fan: enamored with the school’s history, reputation and regular roster of Rhodes Scholars.
But he learned quickly that life in Upstate New York was different for civilians. On his first morning, he joined three new military hires on a tour of the academy. They stopped at the gift shop. Inside, Bakken could see candy, clothes and notebooks bearing West Point’s distinctive logo. The new professor, clad in a business suit, began to follow his uniformed companions through the turnstiles.
The manager held up her hand. “No civilians allowed,” she told the group, in Bakken’s recollection.
Bakken knew he would be in the minority. He hadn’t expected that.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 encouraging service academies to employ civilians. Until then, faculties at West Point and the Air Force Academy were almost entirely commissioned officers. (The Naval Academy already employed half military and half civilian professors.) Lawmakers hoped an influx of civilians with doctorates would boost intellectual diversity and raise academic standards.
West Point undergraduates attend the school's commencement ceremony on May 23. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was the speaker. (Adam Gray/Getty Images)
Dwight D. Eisenhower had earlier pushed the idea. While serving as the Army chief of staff in 1946, he wrote to West Point’s superintendent arguing that cadets should be taught psychology, with help from knowledgeable civilians, so they could handle “human problems on a human basis.”
Bakken seemed the kind of subject-matter expert Eisenhower envisioned: He had worked as a prosecutor and as a lawyer in private practice, and taught at the university level.
In his job interview, Bakken had a swift answer to every question, said Gary Solis, a now-retired West Point professor who served on the hiring committee. He struck the interviewers as smart, capable and unafraid to speak his mind — an exemplar of what civilians were supposed to bring to West Point, Solis said. The committee unanimously recommended him, Solis recalled.
Before the interview ended, Solis reminded Bakken that West Point is not an ordinary school. Teaching there, he said, meant agreeing to abide by military principles: Submitting to authority. Following orders.
“Tim,” Solis recalled, “had no problem with that.”
At the time, Bakken accepted that, for the military to function, rank-and-file soldiers had to obey their superiors, he said. But he took the West Point job believing that, as a civilian professor, he would enjoy the same freedoms — to provoke, to debate, to criticize — afforded to professors at nonmilitary universities.
That was vital, he said, because one day, his cadets would be giving orders to soldiers. He had to teach his students to think critically. Lives depended on it. He would dwell on that over the years as six of his own students were killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What is the purpose of being a military officer, especially a general, if you are unwilling to speak up about something that will help the nation?” Bakken asked in an interview with The Post. “Such as whether a war should be fought, or if the country should withdraw from a war, or if the country is losing soldiers?”
Bakken shakes hands in 2007 with the dean of the Afghan military academy in Kabul, where he taught for six weeks. (Courtesy of Tim Bakken)
Over time, Bakken came to see West Point as its own hierarchical and insulated world, one where civilian professors were distrusted and treated as second-class citizens. More than a dozen current and former West Point personnel, most of them civilians, agreed with Bakken’s impressions. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Their concerns stretched far beyond access to the campus gift shop. For instance, the Army paid for West Point military instructors to pursue graduate degrees, a benefit not offered to civilian professors. While military faculty had their pick of “move-in ready” campus homes with up to six bedrooms, civilians had sparser options for lodging on West Point’s grounds. Military faculty received a year of sabbatical leave, while civilian faculty got six months.
“We were treated as not really members of the community … not full members of the faculty, in a way,” former professor Graham Parsons said. “Civilians are fringe.”
Tim Bakken, third from left in top row, poses with colleagues in Afghanistan in 2007. (Courtesy of Tim Bakken)
Bakken refused to remain on the margins. In 2005, he helped rewrite the faculty manual, granting equal sabbaticals and more flexible working hours for all professors.
Five years later, as chair of an academic freedom committee, Bakken led efforts to add a rule: Civilian professors who believed they were being disciplined or fired for something they said could challenge their punishment on First Amendment grounds.
The rule was tested almost immediately.
In 2010, assistant professor Dan Rice planned to show his cadets “The Tillman Story,” a documentary released that year about the military cover-up in the death of former National Football League player Pat Tillman. He had been shot accidentally by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan, not killed by enemy fire as military officials at first claimed.
The film suggested that Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had retired and was serving as a “distinguished chair” at West Point, had played a role in the cover-up. University administrators opposed the screening, according to Bakken and Rice.
The Washington Post reports:
By Hannah Natanson:
NYACK, N.Y. — The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school’s new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him.
Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. “This violates the First Amendment,” he said, predicting an end to West Point’s professed tolerance for opposing views.
Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn’t want to hear it. “Stop talking,” Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, “and sit down.”
Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. “It’s like how military officers must not follow illegal orders —” he began to say.
“We’re a military institution,” Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. “We follow orders.”
President Donald Trump assumed power for the second time with an ambitious agenda to reshape norms and policies across government and throughout the private sector. His administration has moved swiftly to undo diversity initiatives that proliferated in prior years, reshape how U.S. history is taught in museums and parks, and assert a greater federal role in how universities hire and manage their funding.
To the president’s supporters, these efforts represent an overdue reset for liberal policies that had veered out of control. To many other Americans, they amount to ideological, and sometimes unconstitutional, overreach. In little more than 18 months, the administration has drawn a surge of lawsuits alleging violations of civil liberties or other essential freedoms, a Washington Post analysis of hundreds of thousands of court records found.
One of those was filed by Bakken.
His confrontation with the colonel that day in March 2025 brought the clash to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the emerald-green-and-granite campus on the Hudson River that trains the leaders of tomorrow’s Army. Since World War II, West Point had fostered academic openness, advancing the view that dissenting opinions are crucial in forming sound military judgments. But Trump and his top lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argue that West Point must prize patriotic obedience to authority above all else.
Seven days into his second presidency, Trump issued an executive order forbidding military colleges like West Point from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating” ideas that his administration deemed “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational.” It also required teaching that “America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
Within weeks, West Point’s dean introduced a revised “academic engagement” policy, stipulating that the school’s nearly 700 professors — roughly a third of whom are civilians — must seek approval from their department head before they could deliver a speech, publish a paper or even speak on a podcast.
Bakken had never needed such approval before, he said. One of the first civilian professors hired at West Point, he had taught criminal and constitutional law there since 2000.
Nonmilitary faculty were meant to improve West Point’s intellectual rigor and provide an outside perspective. Many uniformed colleagues never fully embraced their presence, however. Bakken, whose colleagues and students described him as a principled but brusque contrarian with a penchant for criticism, had often felt isolated.
Now, listening to the colonel’s words about “following orders,” Bakken felt alone in the room once again.
He had long argued that a military culture of unquestioning obedience, coupled with an aversion to criticism and a sense of superiority, had caused the U.S. to lose every war it fought since 1945. “Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial,” he wrote in a 2020 book, “The Cost of Loyalty.” “I have been living at the headwaters.”
West Point officials hadn’t liked that book, or much of Bakken’s criticism. But they had never tried to silence him, he said — until Trump’s second presidency, when West Point revised its faculty speech rules.
“Men and women die because other men and women do not have the reasoning, or the ability, or the courage to speak truthfully.”
— Excerpt from Tim Bakken's book "The Cost of Loyalty"
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth, a former Army major and weekend co-host of “Fox & Friends,” said West Point shouldn’t employ civilian professors, calling them “left-wing” and “woke.” In office, he later told cadets that the academy had “hired professors who advocated for anti-American ideologies right here in these halls. But no more.”
West Point’s new policy came as Bakken prepared a new book that, like his first, criticized the academy and the military. But he was unwilling to seek permission to publish it, not from West Point, and not from Hegseth’s Pentagon.
In September, he sued West Point in federal court. The “intent and effect” of his employer’s new policy, he contended, “is to chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, the Army, the Defense Department, Hegseth and Trump.
A spokesperson for West Point declined to answer a list of questions, writing in an email that, “as a matter of policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation.” Various West Point employees declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell likewise declined to comment, citing Bakken’s ongoing lawsuit. But he wrote in a statement that Hegseth “completely supports” Trump’s executive order. Referring to Bakken, Parnell added: “We are not concerned by the half-baked thoughts of a disgruntled individual.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly answer questions about speech by Bakken or other professors at West Point, writing in an email that “individuals who refuse to follow the sacred chain-of-command … threaten the lives of our warfighters. Such reckless and dangerous actions will not be tolerated.”
Although Bakken filed his lawsuit on behalf of civilian faculty, he saw it as protecting the rights of all professors. But they didn’t seem to agree.
After the suit, many stopped speaking to him, he said. His three closest colleagues confided that they’d like to help but their wives wouldn’t allow it. One of his oldest friends, who had started at West Point the same day he did, asked him to reconsider.
“This policy is good for us,” Bakken recalled him saying. “It will prevent us from saying things that get us in trouble.”
Bakken spends many of his hours at home working from a bare-bones black desk, tucked in a corner of his bedroom. (Paola Chapdelaine/For The Washington Post)
Bakken arrived at West Point as a fan: enamored with the school’s history, reputation and regular roster of Rhodes Scholars.
But he learned quickly that life in Upstate New York was different for civilians. On his first morning, he joined three new military hires on a tour of the academy. They stopped at the gift shop. Inside, Bakken could see candy, clothes and notebooks bearing West Point’s distinctive logo. The new professor, clad in a business suit, began to follow his uniformed companions through the turnstiles.
The manager held up her hand. “No civilians allowed,” she told the group, in Bakken’s recollection.
Bakken knew he would be in the minority. He hadn’t expected that.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 encouraging service academies to employ civilians. Until then, faculties at West Point and the Air Force Academy were almost entirely commissioned officers. (The Naval Academy already employed half military and half civilian professors.) Lawmakers hoped an influx of civilians with doctorates would boost intellectual diversity and raise academic standards.
West Point undergraduates attend the school's commencement ceremony on May 23. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was the speaker. (Adam Gray/Getty Images)
Dwight D. Eisenhower had earlier pushed the idea. While serving as the Army chief of staff in 1946, he wrote to West Point’s superintendent arguing that cadets should be taught psychology, with help from knowledgeable civilians, so they could handle “human problems on a human basis.”
Bakken seemed the kind of subject-matter expert Eisenhower envisioned: He had worked as a prosecutor and as a lawyer in private practice, and taught at the university level.
In his job interview, Bakken had a swift answer to every question, said Gary Solis, a now-retired West Point professor who served on the hiring committee. He struck the interviewers as smart, capable and unafraid to speak his mind — an exemplar of what civilians were supposed to bring to West Point, Solis said. The committee unanimously recommended him, Solis recalled.
Before the interview ended, Solis reminded Bakken that West Point is not an ordinary school. Teaching there, he said, meant agreeing to abide by military principles: Submitting to authority. Following orders.
“Tim,” Solis recalled, “had no problem with that.”
At the time, Bakken accepted that, for the military to function, rank-and-file soldiers had to obey their superiors, he said. But he took the West Point job believing that, as a civilian professor, he would enjoy the same freedoms — to provoke, to debate, to criticize — afforded to professors at nonmilitary universities.
That was vital, he said, because one day, his cadets would be giving orders to soldiers. He had to teach his students to think critically. Lives depended on it. He would dwell on that over the years as six of his own students were killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What is the purpose of being a military officer, especially a general, if you are unwilling to speak up about something that will help the nation?” Bakken asked in an interview with The Post. “Such as whether a war should be fought, or if the country should withdraw from a war, or if the country is losing soldiers?”
Bakken shakes hands in 2007 with the dean of the Afghan military academy in Kabul, where he taught for six weeks. (Courtesy of Tim Bakken)
Over time, Bakken came to see West Point as its own hierarchical and insulated world, one where civilian professors were distrusted and treated as second-class citizens. More than a dozen current and former West Point personnel, most of them civilians, agreed with Bakken’s impressions. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Their concerns stretched far beyond access to the campus gift shop. For instance, the Army paid for West Point military instructors to pursue graduate degrees, a benefit not offered to civilian professors. While military faculty had their pick of “move-in ready” campus homes with up to six bedrooms, civilians had sparser options for lodging on West Point’s grounds. Military faculty received a year of sabbatical leave, while civilian faculty got six months.
“We were treated as not really members of the community … not full members of the faculty, in a way,” former professor Graham Parsons said. “Civilians are fringe.”
Tim Bakken, third from left in top row, poses with colleagues in Afghanistan in 2007. (Courtesy of Tim Bakken)
Bakken refused to remain on the margins. In 2005, he helped rewrite the faculty manual, granting equal sabbaticals and more flexible working hours for all professors.
Five years later, as chair of an academic freedom committee, Bakken led efforts to add a rule: Civilian professors who believed they were being disciplined or fired for something they said could challenge their punishment on First Amendment grounds.
The rule was tested almost immediately.
In 2010, assistant professor Dan Rice planned to show his cadets “The Tillman Story,” a documentary released that year about the military cover-up in the death of former National Football League player Pat Tillman. He had been shot accidentally by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan, not killed by enemy fire as military officials at first claimed.
The film suggested that Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had retired and was serving as a “distinguished chair” at West Point, had played a role in the cover-up. University administrators opposed the screening, according to Bakken and Rice.
