OUT ON A LIMB: West Point Needs a Reset.
When I attended West Point back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, cadets used to joke that we got a “$50,000 education, shoved up our a** a nickel at a time.” Times have sure changed. Today, the cost of an education at the nation’s service academies has risen to an estimated quarter-of-a-million dollars per cadet or midshipman, all of which is funded by our tax dollars.
In the past, such an investment was more than worthwhile; West Point has produced such luminaries as Presidents Grant and Eisenhower, World War II Generals MacArthur, Patton, Arnold and Bradley, and scores of other accomplished military, political and business leaders ever since its inception in 1802.
But in recent times, things have changed. Not only has the taxpayer cost of a West Point education risen, but the Academy’s moral and professional compass seems to have shifted.
The U.S. Military Academy was the nation’s first engineering school, and rightly so, because engineering is a crucial skill on the battlefield. Soldiers must plan and build fortifications, bridges and other infrastructure as well as find ways to destroy them. But over the last few decades, the Academy has become more of a Liberal Arts College, offering battlefield-irrelevant course materials in such areas as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies. West Point now offers a minor in Diversity & Inclusion Studies.
Although sexual fraternization has been a problem ever since women were first admitted to the Academy in 1976, among its various “Affinity Clubs” West Point now sponsors a so-called “Spectrum Club” for homosexual and transexual cadets based solely on their sexual orientation. Presumably, such clubs for heterosexual males and females would not be tolerated.
The Cadet Honor Code used to be unequivocal: “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.” The penalty for violating the code was expulsion. Now, not so much. The Honor Code is still “managed” by cadets, but punishment for violators is now solely the Superintendent’s purview. Football players involved in a recent cheating scandal were not only retained but permitted to play in public competitions, including the Army-Navy and Army-Air Force games, both of which they “won.” An athlete-cadet watch thief caught on camera at the Post Exchange was allowed to graduate. The Superintendent has characterized the Honor Code as “aspirational” rather than absolute. The same Superintendent recently excised the school’s “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from West Point’s mission statement.
Remember how shocking this image was in 2017? Apparently not very much to the powers that be at West Point:
