Although I have no evidence that the decision was political, I nonetheless found myself wondering if something else was going on. The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear that people and institutions may be excluded from involvement in professional military education for ideological reasons. The Pentagon has cut academic ties with numerous elite colleges that Hegseth called “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain,” and rescinded a former Biden-administration official’s professorial appointment at West Point. The department has also sought to control the ideas taught at military institutions, instructing the service academies to remove library books that promote “divisive concepts and gender ideology” and requiring them to cancel some classes because of their content.