Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have “the academic freedom to do my job.” But now she’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. Remaining on the faculty, she believes, would mean implicitly lending her approval to policies she cannot support. And she said that the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible.
七年前，Pauline Shanks Kaurin在一所大学任职教授中做得很好，将她的家人连根拔起，并在全国范围内搬迁，在罗德岛州纽波特的海军战争学院教授军事伦理。她告诉我，她这样做了，不仅是为了帮助教育美国军官，而且还向机构承诺，她将拥有“做我工作的学术自由”。但是现在她离开了自己的职位和机构，因为唐纳德·特朗普总统和国防部长皮特·赫格斯的命令在道德和实际上都无法维持下去。她认为，留在教师身上意味着隐含地将她的批准借给她无法支持的政策。她说，曾经雇用她做的那种教学和研究现在将是不可能的。
The Naval War College is one of many institutions—along with the Army War College, the Air War College, and others—that provide graduate-level instruction in national-security issues and award master’s degrees to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. The Naval War College is also home to a widely respected civilian academic post, the James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics, named for the famous admiral and American prisoner of war in Vietnam. Pauline has held the Stockdale Chair since 2018. (I taught for many years at the Naval War College, where I knew Pauline as a colleague.) Her last day will be at the end of this month.
海军战争学院是众多机构之一 - 与陆军战争学院，空战学院等人一起，为国家安全问题提供了研究生级的指导，并授予美国武装部队的男女硕士学位。海军战争学院也是一个广受尊敬的平民学术职位的所在地，詹姆斯·B·斯托克代尔（James B. Stockdale）专业军事伦理主席，以越南著名的海军上将和美国战俘命名。波琳（Pauline）自2018年以来就一直担任斯托克代尔（Stockdale）主席（我在海军战争学院（Naval War College）任教多年，我在那里认识波琳（Pauline）是同事。）她的最后一天将在本月底。
In January, Trump issued an executive order, Restoring America’s Fighting Force, that prohibits the Department of Defense and the entire armed forces from “promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories,” such as “gender ideology,” “race or sex stereotyping,” and, of course, anything to do with DEI. Given the potential breadth of the order, the military quickly engaged in a panicky slash-and-burn approach rather than risk running afoul of the new ideological line. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York, for example, disbanded several clubs, including the local chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Other military installations, apparently anticipating a wider crackdown on anything to do with race or gender, removed important pages of American history about women and minorities from their websites.
一月份，特朗普发布了一项行政命令，恢复了美国的战斗力，禁止国防部和整个武装部队“促进，进步或以其他方式灌输以下非美国人，分裂，歧视性，激进的，极端主义，极端主义和非理性理论，例如“性别意识学”，“种族或性别”或“竞争”或“ dei”和“ dei”和“ dei”和“ dei”和“ dei”和“ dei”和“ dei and and and and dei”。鉴于该命令的潜在广度，军方迅速进行了恐慌的斜线和燃烧的方法，而不是冒着新意识形态路线的风险。例如，位于纽约西点的美国军事学院解散了几个俱乐部，包括国家黑人工程师学会的当地分会。其他军事设施显然预计与种族或性别有关的任何事情都会更加镇压，从其网站上删除了有关妇女和少数民族的重要页面。
All of this was done by bureaucrats and administrators as they tried to comply with Trump’s vague order, banning and erasing anything that the president and Hegseth might construe as even remotely related to DEI or other banned concepts. Some Defense Department workers “deemed to be affiliated with DEI programs or activities” were warned that Trump’s orders “required” their jobs to be eliminated. Many professors at military institutions began to see signs that they might soon be prohibited from researching and publishing in their fields of study.
所有这些都是由官僚和行政人员试图遵守特朗普的模糊命令，禁止和删除总统和赫格斯可能与DEI或其他被禁止的概念遥不可及的任何事情所做的。警告一些国防部的工人“被视为隶属于DEI计划或活动”。军事机构的许多教授开始看到迹象表明，他们可能很快被禁止在研究领域进行研究和出版。
Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class?
Phillip Atiba Solomon：我仍然允许我班上的真相吗？
At first, Pauline was cautious. She knew that her work in the field of military ethics could be controversial—particularly on the issues of oaths and obedience. In the military, where discipline and the chain of command rule daily life, investigating the meaning of oath-taking and obedience is a necessary but touchy exercise. The military is sworn to obey all legal orders, but when that obedience becomes absolute, the results can be ghastly: Pauline wrote her doctoral dissertation at Temple University on oaths, obedience, and the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a young U.S. officer and his men believed that their orders allowed them to slay hundreds of unarmed civilians. For more than 20 years, she taught these matters in the philosophy department at Pacific Lutheran University, and once at Newport, she wrote a book on the contrasting notions of obedience in military and civilian life.
起初，Pauline谨慎。她知道自己在军事伦理领域的工作可能引起争议 - 尤其是在誓言和服从问题上。在军队中，纪律和指挥链规则日常生活，调查宣誓和服从的意义是必要但敏感的练习。军方宣誓服从所有法律命令，但是当这种服从变得绝对时，结果可能会令人恐惧：Pauline在Temple University以誓言，服从和1969年在越南的Lai大屠杀而在Temple University撰写了博士论文，其中年轻的美国军官和他的士兵认为他们的命令使他们的命令允许他们la亵他们的数百名非武装平民。20多年来，她在太平洋路德教会大学的哲学系教授了这些问题，并且在纽波特（Newport），她写了一本关于军事和平民生活中服从概念的书。
When the Trump order came down, Pauline told me that Naval War College administrators gave her “vague assurances” that the college would not interfere with ongoing work by her or other faculty, or with academic freedom in general. But one day, shortly after the executive order in January, she was walking through the main lobby, which proudly features display cases with books by the faculty, and she noticed that a volume on LGBTQ issues in the military had vanished. The disappearance of that book led Pauline to seek more clarity from the college’s administration about nonpartisanship, and especially about academic freedom.
当特朗普命令降临时，波琳告诉我，海军战争大学的管理者“模糊地保证”，该大学不会干扰她或其他教师的持续工作，或者是学术自由。但是有一天，在一月份的行政命令之后不久，她走过主要大厅，该大厅自豪地以教师的书籍为特色，并注意到军队中有关LGBTQ问题的卷已经消失了。那本书的失踪使波琳从学院的政府中寻求更加清楚的关于非合作制度，尤其是关于学术自由的政府。
Academic freedom is an often-misunderstood term. Many people outside academia encounter the idea only when some professor abuses the concept as a license to be an offensive jerk. (A famous case many years ago involved a Colorado professor who compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazis who deserved what they got.) Like tenure, however, academic freedom serves crucial educational purposes, protecting controversial research and encouraging the free exchange of even the most unpopular ideas without fear of political pressure or interference. It is essential to any serious educational institution, and necessary to a healthy democracy.
学术自由是一个经常被忽略的术语。仅当某些教授滥用该概念作为进攻性混蛋的许可时，学术界以外的许多人才会遇到这个想法。（许多年前，一个著名的案件涉及一位科罗拉多州的教授，他将9/11的受害者与应有的纳粹受害者进行了比较。对于任何认真的教育机构来说，这都是至关重要的，对于健康的民主来说是必不可少的。
Conor Friedersdorf: In defense of academic freedom
康纳·弗里德斯多夫（Conor Friedersdorf）：捍卫学术自由
Professors who teach for the military, as I did for many years, do have to abide by some restrictions not found in civilian schools. They have a duty, as sworn federal employees, to protect classified information. They may not use academic freedom to disrupt government operations. (Leading a protest that would prevent other government workers from getting to their duty stations might be one example.) And, of course, they must refrain from violating the Hatch Act: They cannot use government time or resources to engage in partisan political activity. But they otherwise have—or are supposed to have—the same freedoms as their colleagues in civilian institutions.
像我多年来那样，为军队教书的教授确实必须遵守民用学校中发现的一些限制。作为宣誓的联邦雇员，他们有责任保护机密信息。他们可能不会利用学术自由来破坏政府的行动。（领导抗议活动，以防止其他政府工人进入其职责站。）当然，他们必须避免违反《孵化法》：他们不能利用政府的时间或资源来从事党派政治活动。但是，否则，他们拥有与平民机构中同事相同的自由。
Soon, however, jumpy military bureaucrats started tossing books and backing out of conferences. Pauline became more concerned. Newport’s senior administrators began to send informal signals that included, as she put it, the warning that “academic freedom as many of us understood it was not a thing anymore.” Based on those messages, Pauline came to believe that her and other faculty members’ freedom to comment publicly on national issues and choose research topics without institutional interference was soon to be restricted.
然而，很快，跳跃的军事官僚开始抛弃书籍并退出会议。波琳变得更加关注。纽波特（Newport）的高级管理人员开始发送非正式信号，正如她所说，“我们中许多人都知道这已经不再是一件事情的学术自由。”根据这些信息，Pauline开始相信她和其他教职员工在国家问题上公开发表评论并在没有机构干预的情况下选择研究主题的自由很快就受到限制。
During an all-hands meeting with senior college leaders in February, Pauline said that she and other Naval War College faculty were told that the college would comply with Hegseth’s directives and that, in Pauline’s words, “if we were thinking we had academic freedom in our scholarship and in the classroom, we were mistaken.” (Other faculty present at the meeting confirmed to me that they interpreted the message from the college’s leadership the same way; one of them later told me that the implication was that the Defense Department could now rule any subject out of bounds for classroom discussion or scholarly research at will.) Pauline said there were audible gasps in the room, and such visible anger that it seemed to her that even the administrators hosting the meeting were taken aback. “I’ve been in academia for 31 years,” she told me, and that gathering “was the most horrifying meeting I’ve ever been a part of.”
在2月与高级大学领导人的全方手会面中，Pauline说，她和其他海军战争学院的教师被告知，该学院将遵守赫格斯的指示，用Pauline的话说：“如果我们认为我们在奖学金中拥有学术自由，并且在课堂上有学术自由，那么我们是错误的。”（在会议上出席会议的其他教师向我证实，他们以同样的方式解释了学院领导层的信息；其中一个人告诉我，这意味着国防部现在可以将任何主题排除在课堂讨论或学术研究的范围内。她告诉我：“我在学术界工作了31年。”聚会是“我参加过的最恐怖的会议。”
I contacted the college’s provost, Stephen Mariano, who told me in an email that these issues were “nuanced” but that the college had not changed its policies on academic freedom. (He also denied any changes relating to tenure, a practice predicated on academic freedom.) At the same time, he added, the college is “complying with all directives issued by the President and Department of Defense and following Department of the Navy policy.” This language leaves Pauline and other civilian faculty at America’s military schools facing a paradox: They are told that academic freedom still exists, but that their institutions are following directives from Hegseth that, at least on their face, seem aimed at ending academic freedom.
我联系了学院的教务长史蒂芬·马里亚诺（Stephen Mariano），后者在一封电子邮件中告诉我，这些问题是“细微的”，但学院并未改变其关于学术自由的政策。（他还否认了与任期有关的任何变化，这是基于学术自由的做法。）与此同时，他补充说，该学院“遵守总统和国防部以及海军政策部门的所有指令遵守所有指令”。这种语言使Pauline和其他平民在美国的军事学校面临悖论：他们被告知，学术自由仍然存在，但是他们的机构正在遵循Hegseth的指示，至少在他们面前，他们似乎旨在结束学术自由。
In March, Pauline again sought clarity from college leaders. They were clearly anxious to appear compliant with the new political line. (“We don’t want to end up on Fox News,” she said one administrator told her.) She was told her work was valued, but she didn’t believe it. “Talk is cheap,” she said. “Actions matter.” She said she asked the provost point-blank: What if a faculty member has a book or an article coming out on some controversial topic? His answer, according to her: Hypothetically, they might consider pulling the work from publication. (Mariano denies saying this and told me that there is no change in college policy on faculty publication.)
3月，Pauline再次寻求大学领导人的清晰度。他们显然渴望表现出符合新的政治路线。（“我们不想最终成为福克斯新闻，”她说，一位管理员告诉她。）她被告知她的作品被重视了，但她不相信。她说：“谈话很便宜。”“行动很重要。”她说她问教务长尖头：如果教职员工有一本书或有关有争议的话题的文章，该怎么办？根据她的说法，他的回答是：假设他们可能会考虑将作品从出版中撤出。（Mariano否认这一点，并告诉我，教师出版的大学政策没有变化。）
Every government employee knows the bureaucratic importance of putting things on paper. Pauline’s current project is about the concept of honor, which necessarily involves questions regarding masculinity and gender—issues that could turn the DOD’s new McCarthyites toward her and her work. So she now proposed that she and the college administration work up a new contract, laying out more clearly—in writing—what the limits on her work and academic freedom would look like.
每个政府雇员都知道将事情放在纸上的官僚主义重要性。Pauline目前的项目是关于荣誉的概念，该项目必然涉及有关男子气概和性别的问题，这可能会将国防部的新麦卡锡人转向她和她的工作。因此，她现在建议她和大学行政部门签订了一份新合同，在书面上更清楚地阐明了她的工作和学术自由的局限性。
She might as well have asked for a pony. Administrators, she said, told her that they hoped she wouldn’t resign, but that no one was going to put anything in writing. “The upshot,” according to her, was a message from the administration that boiled down to: We hope you can just suck it up and not need your integrity for your final year as the ethics chair.
她也可能要求小马。她说，管理员告诉她，他们希望她不会辞职，但是没有人会写任何东西。根据她的说法，“结果”是政府的一条信息，它归结为：我们希望您可以吸收它，而不需要您作为道德主席的最后一年的正直。
After that, she told me, her choices were clear. “As they say in the military: Salute and execute—or resign.” Until then, she had “hoped maybe people would still come to their senses.” The promises of seven years ago were gone; the institution now apparently expected her and other faculty to self-censor in the classroom and preemptively bowdlerize their own research. “I don’t do DEI work,” she said, “but I do moral philosophy, and now I can’t do it. I’d have to take out discussions of race and gender and not do philosophy as I think it should be done.” In April, she submitted a formal letter of resignation.
之后，她告诉我，她的选择很明确。“正如他们在军队中所说的：致敬和处决 - 或辞职。”在那之前，她“希望人们仍然会掌握自己的感官。”七年前的承诺消失了。现在，该机构显然希望她和其他教职员工在课堂上进行自我审查，并先发行自己的研究。她说：“我不做Dei工作，但是我做着道德哲学，现在我做不到。我必须对种族和性别进行讨论，而不是像我认为应该做的那样做哲学。”4月，她提交了正式的辞职信。
Initially, she had no interest in saying anything publicly. Pauline is a native Montanan and single mom of two, and by nature not the type of person to engage in public food fights. (She used to joke with me when we were colleagues that I was the college’s resident lightning rod, and she had no interest in taking over that job.) She’s a philosopher who admires quiet stoicism, and she was resolved to employ it in her final months.
最初，她对公开说什么没有兴趣。宝琳（Pauline）是蒙塔南（Montanan）的本地人，是两个人的单身母亲，而不是从事公共饮食战斗的那种类型。（当我们是同事时，她曾经和我开玩笑说我是该学院的居民避雷针，而且她对接管这份工作没有兴趣。）她是一位哲学家，他钦佩安静的坚定主义，她决心在最后几个月雇用它。
But she also thought about what she owed her chair’s namesake. “Stockdale thought philosophy was important for officers. The Stockdale course was created so that officers would wrestle with moral obligations. He was a personal model of integrity.” Even so, she did not try to invoke him as a patron saint when she decided to resign. “I’m not saying he would agree with the choice that I made,” she told me. “But his model of moral integrity is part of the chair.”
但是她还考虑了自己欠椅子的同名的东西。“斯托克代尔思想哲学对官员很重要。斯托克代尔课程是创建的，以便军官以道德义务搏斗。他是个人诚信的个人模式。”即便如此，当她决定辞职时，她也没有试图将他作为守护神。她告诉我：“我并不是说他会同意我做出的选择。”“但是他的道德诚信模式是主席的一部分。”
She kept her resignation private until early May, when a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Graham Parsons—another scholar who teaches ethics in a military school, and a friend of Pauline’s—likewise decided to resign in protest and said that he would leave West Point after 13 years. Hegseth’s changes “prevent me from doing my job responsibly,” he wrote in The New York Times. “I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.” Hegseth responded on X, sounding more like a smug internet troll than a concerned superior: “You will not be missed Professor Parsons.” The episode changed Pauline’s mind. She felt she owed her friends and colleagues whatever public support and solidarity she could offer them.
她一直私下辞职，直到5月初，当时西点的美国军事学院的一名教授格雷厄姆·帕森斯（Graham Parsons）（另一个学者在军事学校教道德，以及Pauline的朋友），例如，像Pauline的朋友一样决定辞职以抗议，并说他将在13年后离开西点。他在《纽约时报》上写道，赫格斯的变化“阻止我负责任地完成工作”。“我以目前的形式与该学院有联系而感到羞耻。”赫格斯（Hegseth）在X上做出了回应，听起来更像是一个自鸣得意的互联网巨魔，而不是关注的上级：“您不会错过帕森教授。”这一集改变了波琳的想法。她觉得她欠朋友和同事，无论她可以提供的公众支持和团结。
Nor are she and Parsons alone. Tom McCarthy, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, recently resigned as chair of the history department rather than remove a paper from an upcoming symposium. And last month, a senior scholar at the Army War College, in Pennsylvania, Carrie Lee, also handed in her resignation, a decision she announced to her friends and followers on Bluesky.
她也不是一个人。马里兰州安纳波利斯美国海军学院的教授汤姆·麦卡锡（Tom McCarthy）最近辞去历史系主任，而不是从即将举行的研讨会上删除一篇论文。上个月，宾夕法尼亚州陆军战争学院的一名高级学者凯莉·李（Carrie Lee）也交给了她的辞职，这是她向布鲁斯基（Bluesky）的朋友和追随者宣布的决定。
Jason Dempsey: Hegseth has all the wrong enemies
杰森·登普西（Jason Dempsey）：赫格斯（Hegseth）拥有所有错误的敌人
Lee told me in an email that she’d been thinking of leaving after Trump was elected, because it was apparent to her that the Trump administration was “going to try and politicize the military and use military assets/personnel to suppress democratic rights,” and that academic freedom in military schools was soon to “become untenable.” Like Pauline, Lee felt like she was at a dead end: “To speak from within the institution itself will also do more harm than good. So to dissent, I have little choice but to leave,” she said in a farewell letter to her colleagues in April.
李在一封电子邮件中告诉我，她在特朗普当选后一直在考虑离开，因为对她来说，特朗普政府显然“将尝试使军事力量进行政治化，并利用军事资产/人员来抑制民主权利”，而军事学校的学术自由很快就会“变得难以置信”。像Pauline一样，Lee感到自己处于死胡同：“从机构内部讲话也将弊大于利。因此，对异议，我别无选择，只能离开，”她在四月给同事的告别信中说。
I asked Pauline what she thinks might have happened if she had decided to stay and just tough it out from the inside. She “absolutely” thinks she’d have been fired at some point, and she didn’t want such a firing “to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.” But then I asked her if by resigning, she was giving people in the Trump administration, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—who once said that his goal was to make federal workers feel “trauma” to the point where they will quit their jobs—exactly what they want: Americans leaving federal service.
我问Pauline，如果她决定留下来并从内部努力努力，她认为可能会发生什么。她“绝对”认为自己在某个时候被解雇了，她不希望这样的解雇“成为斯托克代尔椅子的遗产。”但是后来我问她是否辞职，她正在给特朗普政府的人们，例如管理和预算局长罗素·沃奇（Russell Vorge） - 曾经说他的目标是让联邦工人感到“创伤”，以至于他们将辞职的地步 - 事实上，他们想要的是他们想要的东西：美国人离开联邦服务。
She didn’t care. “When you make a moral decision, there are always costs.” She dismissed what people like Vought want or think. “I’m not accountable to him. I’m accountable to the Lord, to my father, to my legacy, to my children, to my profession, to members of the military-ethics community. So I decided that I needed to resign. Not that it would change anyone’s mind, but to say: This is not okay. That is my message.”
她不在乎。“当您做出道德决定时，总会有成本。”她驳斥了人们喜欢或思考的人。“我对他不负责。我对主，父亲，我的遗产，我的孩子，我的职业，对军事伦理学社区的成员负责。因此，我决定我需要辞职。并不是说这会改变任何人的想法，而是要说：这是不好的。这是我的信息。”
At the end of our discussion, I asked an uncomfortable question I’d been avoiding. Pauline, I know, is only in her mid-50s, in mid-career, and too young simply to retire. She has raised two sons who will soon enter young adulthood. I asked her if she was worried about her future.
在讨论结束时，我问了一个不舒服的问题。我知道，Pauline仅在50年代中期，职业中期，太年轻而无法退休。她抚养了两个儿子，他们将很快进入年轻的成年。我问她是否担心自己的未来。
“Sure,” she said. “But at the end of the day, as we say in Montana, sometimes you just have to saddle up and ride scared.”
“当然，”她说。“但是归根结底，正如我们在蒙大拿州所说的那样，有时您只需要骑马并害怕。”
