DEI Destroys Excellence, Military Cohesion at Service Academies
By Bruce Fleming
January 18, 2024
AP
This is an excerpt from Bruce Fleming's new book, Saving Our Service Academies (Post Hill Press).
Applicants who self-identified as a member of a race the Academy wished to privilege—at the time I was on the Admissions Board it was African American, Hispanic, and Native American—were briefed separately to the committee not by a white member but by a minority Navy lieutenant. Briefings (a minute and forty seconds per applicant, no more) ran through a number of factors quite quickly and offered a recommendation that we had been told was appropriate: “qualified” for USNA if grades A/B for white applicants (but not minorities, who needed only C grades), 600 score in each part of the SAT for white applicants (but about 550 for minorities who come to USNA without remediation), and Whole Person Multiple (points given for grades/tests, school leadership positions, and sports) of at least 55,000 for whites, no bottom for minorities.
This is aside from the fact that 20 percent of the class could be sent to the remedial, taxpayer-supported prep school for a year, also with no minimum for scores. Other possible recommendations included a year at a civilian prep school that the Naval Academy Foundation pays for, where they also do a thirteenth year (the profile for this was white lacrosse players, not black football players), and USNA “pool,” a sort of wait list for nonrecruited whites, who typically weren’t tracked to NAPS or Foundation schools. The athletic department offered its list of recruits that were invariably deemed “qualified” no matter how low in scores, because many if not most to go to NAPS and only a few to USNA directly.
Race in America is a complex question that we have no silver bullet for. We’d like to see everybody playing happily in the academic sandbox together, as well as elsewhere in society at large. However, in academic institutions with limited places, we have a problem—especially at an institution touted for academic rigor and that taxpayers fund for one specific job. Blacks, on average, consistently score lower than whites (who score lower than Asians) on standardized tests. The choices are simple. If you want students who look a certain way but tend to score lower than others, you accept the lower scores and stop talking about your standards. Or you go with the class that can meet these standards and stop talking about the way they look. The Naval Academy tries to square the circle by both bragging about its standards and letting in half the class to lower standards. No wonder they were furious that I pointed this out. All educational institutions have this problem to some degree; the academies are just worse than others. And in 2023, the Supreme Court said we’re legal in doing so, whereas all others are not.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/18/dei_destroys_excellence_military_cohesion_at_service_academies_1005678.html
