Naval Academy Eliminates Affirmative Action
Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images- The U.S. Naval Academy will no longer consider race in admissions.
- This decision follows a directive from the Trump administration banning DEI activities within the Defense Department.
- Recent legal decisions have upheld the academy’s consideration of race in admissions.
- The nation’s other military academies are likely to follow suit.
The U.S. Naval Academy is doing an about-face on affirmative action.
In a tug-of-war battle, the Trump administration has prevailed over the federal courts, causing the Naval Academy to abandon its decades-long practice of race-conscious admissions.
According to court filings made public March 28, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, Vice Admiral Yvette M. Davids, determined in February it was necessary for the academy to revise its admissions policies to adhere to a directive from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The secretary’s Jan. 29 memo stated that the Defense Department will “strive to provide merit-based, color-blind, equal opportunities to service members” and that no department members, including service academies, could “establish sex-based, race-based, or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission, or career fields.”
Hegseth’s memo followed up on President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order calling for the “elimination of race-based and sex-based discrimination within the armed forces of the United States.”
As such, the Naval Academy will no longer consider race, ethnicity, or sex as a factor for admission, according to court documents.
These documents were filed as part of ongoing litigation against the academy pursued by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the group that prevailed in the 2023 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious admissions.
In his majority opinion in that case, SFFA v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts included a brief footnote exempting the nation’s military academies from the ruling “in light of the potentially distinct interests [they] may present.”
Not satisfied with that exemption, SFFA brought suits against the Naval Academy, the U.S. Military Academy (West Point), and the U.S. Air Force Academy aiming to prevent these institutions from considering race in admissions.
Those efforts stalled in the courts. Last December, a district court ruled in favor of the Naval Academy, claiming its “race-conscious admissions policies are narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest in national security.”
The academy’s “limited use of race in admissions,” Senior District Judge Richard Bennett argued, “has increased the racial diversity of the Navy and Marine Corps, which has enhanced national security by improving the Navy and Marine Corps’ unit cohesion and lethality, recruitment and retention, and domestic and international legitimacy.”
Despite these court protections, the Trump administration sought to ban racial preferences at military academies as part of its broader agenda to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
And it succeeded, at least with respect to the Naval Academy. In light of this capitulation, SFFA’s case against the academy should be rendered moot, Navy officials suggest in the court documents.
“Students for Fair Admissions welcomes the announcement that the U.S. Naval Academy will end its unfair and illegal race-based admissions policies,” Edward Blum, president of SFFA, said in a statement. “Racial discrimination is wrong, and racial classifications have no place at our nation’s military academies.”
Whether West Point and the Air Force Academy follow suit remains in question.
In 2024, the Supreme Court denied SFFA’s bid to prevent West Point from considering race in its upcoming admissions cycle, while SFFA’s suit against the Air Force Academy is pending with the U.S. District Court in Colorado.
Yet given the Naval Academy’s decision, similar policy changes among the other military academies should be expected.
Meanwhile, how might a decline in diversity affect the Naval Academy and, by extension, the Navy and Marine Corps?
In his lengthy discussion of the issue of race in the military, Bennett cited historical examples of how racial imbalance in the various service branches, especially a lack of Black representation within the officer corps, caused unrest and disloyalty among the troops.
“The military’s history of racial discrimination and racial tensions, and resulting ‘lack of unit cohesion,’ ‘lack of trust,’ and ‘diminish[ed] … capability,’ directly informed the military’s judgment about the critical need for diversity in the armed forces generally and in the officer corps more specifically,” he wrote.
Bennett also noted that the Navy has the “widest gap in minority representation among officers and enlisted.” While 52% of Navy service members are racial minorities, only 31% of Navy officers fall into that category.
Moreover, 92% of Navy admirals are white, including all 10 of those serving at the highest possible rank.
Although the route to officer ranks within the Navy and Marine Corps doesn’t track only through the Naval Academy — in 2015, only about 20% of officers in those branches were Naval Academy graduates — this policy change could have serious implications for military morale and national security for years to come.