SAR’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project investigates and reports attacks on higher education with the aim of raising awareness, generating advocacy, and increasing protection for scholars, students, and academic communities. Starting July 1, 2026, SAR no longer publishes reports for the incidents that it records. SAR continues to monitor and record incidents that will be used in the annual Free to Think report. This page provides a record of incidents reported up to that date. Learn more about the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project.

Date of Incident: March 31, 2025

Attack Types: Other

Institution(s):United States Naval Academy

Region & Country:Americas | United States of America

New or Ongoing:New Incident

From March 31 to April 1, 2025, Naval officials purged 381 books deemed to be associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the Nimitz Library collection at the US Naval Academy (USNA). The removal was ordered by the office of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Just a few days prior to the book purge, on March 25, the Capital Gazette newspaper published an article on a USNA statement explaining the institution’s decision not to restrict access to books focused on themes related to DEI. The statement came after the Department of Defense Education Activity, which oversees 161 schools attended by students from military-connected families, ordered those schools to remove books related to DEI in compliance with an executive order focused on DEI programming in K-12 educational institutions, which President Donald Trump signed on January 29th. USNA stated that, as an institution of higher education, it did not need to comply with the executive order. After the story, the office of Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered the Naval Academy to remove books associated with DEI. In response, civilian Navy officials used keywords to search the Nimitz Library catalog of nearly 600,000 books. The officials identified around 900 books for review, and selected 381 books to purge.

Scholars at Risk is concerned about state censorship and interference with institutional autonomy and academic freedom. While legislative and executive officials have a right to express their views about the content of research, teaching, and discourse, they have an obligation to refrain from interference into the selection of that content. State censorship and threatened retaliation or sanctions against individuals or institutions undermine university autonomy, academic freedom, and democratic society generally.

Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/us/politics/naval-academy-banned-books.html
https://apnews.com/article/military-academies-dei-hegseth-trump-ba9731f24b4eb4bd9c02b568209f97af
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/04/02/naval-academy-remove-400-dei-books/
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Press-Releases/display-pressreleases/Article/4146516/list-of-books-removed-from-usna-library/
https://www.capitalgazette.com/2025/03/25/naval-academy-will-not-remove-dei-related-materials-from-library/