The U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) is teaching officer candidates how to deconstruct English literature using an array of LGBT and critical race theory-based assignments.
Via a Freedom of Information Act request, the Daily Caller obtained slightly redacted USNA course syllabi showing the level of woke indoctrination occurring in the Annapolis English department.
The department’s “diversity statement,” which opens each syllabus, offers an excellent view into the mindset of those training future naval officers. Instead of teaching them to appreciate the civilization they are supposed to be defending, it teaches them to think in terms of victimized groups. Thus, it promises to stamp out “harassment or bullying of any sort, particularly that based on race, gender, gender identity, religion, national origin, geographic background, neurological make up (neurodiversity), political and ideological perspectives [ha!], LGBTQ+ status, immigration status, social and economic status, veteran status, age or disability.”
In fact, the very first thing the students in HE 374, Topics in Gender & Sexuality in Literature, are expected to do is draft a “land acknowledgment” — a white-guilt statement of which American Indian tribes once occupied the land where the USNA now stands.
According to a syllabus that appears to be from the fall 2021 semester, HE 374 will teach students to “read and write critically about gender and sexuality in literature and in [their] experience” and to “understand literary criticism and theory around gender and sexuality, including the foundations of feminist literary theory.”
“Gender and Sexuality studies,” it explains, “began as Women’s Studies, which was one of the many outcomes of the Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1970s and 80s.” However — horror of horrors! — “most of the faculty, students, and topics of study in early Women’s Studies programs were limited by being White, middleclass, women.”
Fortunately, Women’s Studies now include “Queer Theory, Masculinity Studies, Intersectionality, race, and class,” says the syllabus. “Women’s Studies Programs are feminist at their hearts; Gender and Sexuality Studies Programs are not, and in fact, might even reject feminism for its original focus on White middleclass women.”
After finishing their “land acknowledgment,” students are expected to complete a variety of other assignments, including writing a class diversity statement and learning “theories of gender” and the “Genderbread person,” which the Daily Caller describes as “a visual made to show a difference between ‘gender identity,’ ‘gender expression,’ ‘anatomical sex,’ ‘gender’ and ‘sexual orientation.’” They are also required to keep a journal based on a chapter of Tacit Racism, a 2020 book by Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck, and then write a paper based on the journal.
Among the other required readings for the course are:
- The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender by Nancy Chodorow, which posits that women do not have a natural mothering instinct but learn it “through social-structurally induced psychological mechanisms”;
- Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory by Toril Moi, which imagines a future “beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality”;
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, a memoir of a girl coming to terms with her lesbianism; and
- “Double Consciousness” by socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, which argues that black Americans struggle to remain true to their heritage while conforming to the majority-white society around them.
Students are told they “are not expected to agree with” the Chodorow and Moi tomes, whose concepts they must apply in other papers they have to write for the course. But when the syllabus tells you to address your female instructor as “Professor,” “Dr.,” or “Dean” but never “Miss, Ms., or Mrs.” because “this is generally taken as an insult” by distaff faculty members, woe to those who disagree!
The Daily Caller summarized what it discovered in two syllabi for the spring and fall 2023 semesters:
The Spring 2023 course was divided into three main sections, starting with “an exploration of the masculine/feminine binary,” then moving to “a historical and contemporary discussion of the rejection and empowerment of specific sexualities” and finally the “utilization of Gender and Sexuality to enforce or deconstruct the othering of nonwestern culture,” the syllabus showed.
“This course promises … [to] create a welcoming space for discussion and practice of vocabulary in relation to Gender and Sexuality,” the syllabus states….
A course description for the class available on the academy’s website advertises students will learn “advanced methods of analyzing literature and culture [as] taught through a set of focused readings of theories, histories, perspectives, and/or major figures in LGBTQ, women’s and/or gender studies,” including Audre Lorde, Sarah Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldua — who described herself as a “Chicana dyke-feminist” — and Kimberle Crenshaw, a Critical Race Theory scholar.
The USNA’s website is also advertising for a “tenure-track” assistant professor of English specializing in “Gender and Sexuality Studies.” The academy “welcome[s] subspecialties in disability studies, film, and multiethnic or global Anglophone literature.”
The Daily Caller contacted Annapolis for comment on the syllabi it obtained. The USNA responded with a statement noting that the courses are optional and elaborating:
The Naval Academy focuses on respect and inclusion of people of all backgrounds in order to develop well-rounded future leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps….
A vast array of intellectual ideas, approaches and theories are mentioned during classroom discussions. The Naval Academy educates midshipmen to be critical thinkers who can analyze issues from multiple perspectives and contexts; our focus is on how to think, not what to think.
To which one can only reply, “Aye aye, zhir!”
