US Naval Academy canceled author’s lecture that would have criticized book bans

The US Naval Academy canceled a lecture that author Ryan Holiday was scheduled to give to students there last week after he refused to remove slides from his planned presentation that criticized the academy’s decision to remove nearly 400 books from its main library. Holiday, a writer and philosopher who has lectured at the US Naval Academy more than half a dozen times since 2019, told CNN on Saturday that he was invited by the academy in November to give a lecture about wisdom to midshipmen on April 14. He had previously spoken to students there, including during the first Trump administration, as part of a series on stoicism and the pursuit of virtue and excellence. But an hour before he was scheduled to give his talk last week, as he was getting ready in his hotel room in Annapolis, Holiday says he received a call from the school asking him if he could refrain from mentioning the academy’s decision earlier this month to remove 381 books from the shelves of its Nimitz Library. “I said I couldn’t do that,” Holiday recalled. “I couldn’t have spoken in front of these midshipmen about courage and about doing the right thing, and then remove, I think, a very reasonable objection to a very egregious concept.” The Naval Academy, where students are military officers-in-training, removed the books in an attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order in January mandating the removal of all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” content from K-12 schools, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later said also applied to military academies. The banned books include Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Janet Jacobs’ “Memorializing the Holocaust,” and hundreds of other books dealing with issues of gender and racism, according to a database published by the New York Times. “I actually agree that the Academy should be apolitical,” Holiday told CNN. “That’s what makes this political meddling in their access to books so troubling. And then to suppress criticism of that obvious mistake, is to model even poorer moral leadership to the midshipman.” The presentation Holiday had prepared focused on US Naval Academy graduate James Stockdale, a Vietnam War hero and Medal of Honor recipient, who studied Marxist theory at Stanford in the 1960s not because he was a Marxist but to better understand the adversary The same principle should apply to today’s future military leaders, Holiday thought. The slides in his presentation, which CNN reviewed, urged students to “read critically, read dangerously,” and “read like a spy in an enemy’s camp”— a quote from the Stoic philosopher Seneca. The presentation also included quotes from Stockdale, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley — who Trump has criticized — urging students to read extensively, even if the ideas in some books made them uncomfortable. “Leaders must be independent thinkers, otherwise they are not leaders,” read one slide. The presentation also included a screenshot of a New York Times article about the books’ removal from Naval Academy shelves, and a photo of the front of Holiday’s Texas bookstore, which is emblazoned with lyrics from a Rage Against the Machine song: “They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove ‘em.” Holiday told CNN he had sent his presentation over to the school the night before the lecture to get it loaded up onto projectors, not for prior approval. But the day he was scheduled to talk, he was asked to remove the slides mentioning the book ban after they were reviewed by senior academy leadership. Holiday said he is concerned about the message the censorship is sending to future military leaders. “If you can’t be trusted around Stacey Abrams’ memoir or Maya Angelou, you probably have no business being a Navy SEAL or holding an assault rifle or flying a fighter jet,” Holiday said. “You’re either an adult or you’re not.” “The larger point that I was trying to make is that you have to be able to think critically if you’re going to be a leader,” Holiday added. “Because if you’re not thinking for yourself, you are, by definition, not leading.” CNN has reached out to the Navy and the US Naval Academy for comment. This is not the first time the Naval Academy has been accused of censorship as it has worked to comply with the Pentagon’s new anti-DEI policies. Earlier this month, the academy had to return photos and memorabilia of Jewish women after they were “mistakenly removed” from a display—an apparent “knee-jerk reaction” because “no one actually knows what they mean by DEI content … therefore, they’re like ‘Well, let’s just take down all the photos of women,’” a person familiar with the removal told CNN at the time. There have been a number of other similar instances since Hegseth ordered the Defense Department to scrub “diversity” content from every facet of the military. Students and parents told CNN earlier this month that the policy is having a direct impact on students at Defense Department schools around the globe, as classes like AP Psychology and certain student clubs and books have been banned from DoD schools. The ACLU is now suing DoD over the policy. Articles about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness, sexual assault and suicide prevention were also among the tens of thousands either removed or flagged for removal from Pentagon websites as the department scrambled to comply with Hegseth’s order. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell acknowledged in March, after an article about sports icon and veteran Jackie Robinson was removed, that some “important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed” amid the efforts mandated by Hegseth. “We want to be very, very clear: History is not DEI,” Parnell said. “When content is either mistakenly removed – or if it is maliciously removed – we continue to work quickly to restore it.”