On April 15, 2025, the United States Naval Academy (USNA) canceled a lecture by Ryan Holiday, an author who has become known for his writings on stoicism. The cancellation occurred an hour before the lecture was scheduled to take place, and the decision to cancel the lecture was apparently related to concerns that some of the lecture’s material would trigger pressures on the university from the United States government.

The April 15th lecture would have been the fourth in a series of annual lectures given by Holiday at USNA. In it, Holiday planned to speak about the life of James Stockdale, a Naval Academy graduate, whose studies of Marxism at Stanford University in the 1960s were supported by the Navy with the aim of better understanding a US adversary – the Soviet Union. As part of his lecture, Holiday included two slides on USNA’s recent purge of nearly 400 books from its library (see report).

Holiday sent the presentation to USNA the night prior to the lecture so that the academy could load it onto the projectors for the event. An hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin, Holiday received a call from USNA’s administration asking him to remove the slides discussing the purge of books. According to Holiday, his slides had been sent up USNA’s chain of command, and the academy was worried that it would suffer from reprisals if his talk appeared to defy Executive Order 14151 (2025) on ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. When Holiday refused to remove the slides, USNA canceled his talk.

Scholars at Risk is concerned about the cancellation of an academic presentation by a qualified scholar in an apparent attempt to censor the content of the presentation to avoid state retaliation against the host institution. Limits on academic research, teaching, or discourse, whether imposed by higher education leaders or state officers, undermine academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and democratic society generally.

Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/politics/naval-academy-trump.html
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/higher-education/ryan-holiday-naval-academy-lecture-dei-RDG7YVOTCRAIJPF2FT6GITCHXQ/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/19/politics/us-naval-academy-canceled-authors-lecture-book-bans/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/naval-academy-cancels-speech-podcaster-amid-cultural-turmoil/story?id=120975608
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/naval-academy-speech-censorship.html