DON VINCENZO writes:

I would embark on a fool’s errand to repeat the details of the ongoing saga of the decline of the U.S. military academies, but my naiveté allows me to think that sanity will ultimately prevail. That hope of a change for the better dimmed recently when Prof. Bruce Fleming, the Naval Academy’s curmudgeon, revealed that he was once again threatened with expulsion from his 27-year teaching position because of his “insensitivity.”

For those unfamiliar with Fleming’s record, while he served on the Naval Academy’s Admissions Committee, he blew the whistle on the aggressive recruitment of blacks and women. It was he who wrote that the acceptance of this two-tier admission system was responsible for “the corruption of the morals of the Naval Academy.” Professor David Allen White, who taught at the Naval Academy for nearly three decades, has told me, “When women entered the Academy, the place went to hell in a hand basket.”

And what, pray tell, was Fleming’s sin? It appears that last year the Academy began investigating his “…disparaging comments about the school’s sexual assault prevention training in class and in e-mails to two female students.” Fleming had “criticized” the Academy’s prevention training as “a presumption of guilt against male students,” at which point two females in the class “pushed back,” claiming that Fleming was “perpetuating the rape myth.” From The Post’s article: “The female midshipmen felt singled out and harassed by the professor’s comments,” (Emphasis mine) something that Fleming believes was later to become an attempt to bring a sexual harassment complaint against him. (Recall Professor White’s description.)

Fleming was cleared by the English Department, but he then filed counter-charges against the two students for “disrespect or insubordination to a superior or authority figure.” A female student, presumably one of the two involved, protested the Department’s handling of the case and it was re-opened. Fleming was now charged with engaging inappropriate conduct, and received a letter of reprimand, which will remain in his file for two years, a judgment affirmed by a third investigating officer. Fleming has fought back and now insists that, “What they (the Academy’s hierarchy) are trying to do is to shut me down.”

“Diversity” has become the primary objective of the U.S. military academies, and is in full force today throughout the entire military. The original purpose of the academies to train the warrior class seems to have been lost in the mists of history, but that change has made these once hallowed institutions nothing more than another governmental instrument of social engineering. I am reminded of an Italian proverb: “Whoever forsakes the old way for the new, knows what he is losing but not what he will find.”

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