Even before the presidential election, the school began preparing for Donald Trump’s potential return to power. Now faculty members are resigning in protest.
For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials.
But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start.
The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of “The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,” it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government’s foreign aid programs.
According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school’s leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president.
The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy’s library, and the school’s cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters.
Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy’s in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon’s chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief.
The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution’s academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon.