U.S. Naval Academy Pulls Nearly 400 Books From College Library

The library of the U.S Naval Academy is the latest victim of censorship, with more than 380 volumes taken from shelves after a review. Academy leaders said the move was to comply with President Trump’s executive orders that oppose DEI.

The campus library serves the roughly 4,400 midshipmen who attend the service academy. Candidates must be between 17 and 23 upon entry, according to the academy’s website, which also shares demographic statistics about the diversity of its student body.

That’s admissions, though. In the library, they have locked away removed books  in a room that the adults enrolled in the academy can’t access.

The titles removed include banned-book list stalwarts like Maia Kobabe’s memoir Gender Queer, Angie Thomas’ young-adult smash novel The Hate U Give and Ibram X. Kendi’s prescriptive How to be an Antiracist.

But many more are academic books studying aspects of race and gender. Gone are university press-published scholarly tomes like  The Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the United States and The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority. Also out: Biographies of sports figures like boxing legend Jack Johnson and how-to books on managing Gen Xers in the workplace.

A U.S. Air Force Academy spokesman said April 14 that the academy was “conducting a deliberate review” of its library to comply with executive orders and Defense Department policy. West Point referred my request to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office, which sent a link to the list of books removed from the Naval Academy’s library and then pointed me back to the service academies.

Intellectual freedom advocates had lots to say, however.

“This is the first college-level library banning we have seen,” said author Jennifer Finney Boylan, president of PEN America. “It reflects the steep escalation of government censorship we are seeing under the Trump administration, which continues its unrelenting efforts to control what Americans can read, learn and think.”

“Book bans are an aggressive, systemic form of lying, both about the past and the present,” charged Robert P. Jones in a Religion News Service essay. Jones is the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute as well as the author of the National Book Award-winning White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, one of the books pulled from the Naval Academy’s library.

“Removing these books from the academic library – which almost certainly excludes them from course adoption – means any student attending the once-prestigious Naval Academy will receive a distorted education,” he wrote.

The removals follow a purge of school libraries that serve military families. The Department of Defense sent a memo to parents in early February that library service would be suspended for a week while officials combed through the catalog for titles that ran afoul of Trump’s executive orders to strip K-12 schools of what the president termed “indoctrination.” On the chopping block as a result of the review: A picture book about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Freckleface Strawberry, actress Julianne Moore’s foray into kids’ books.

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who has helmed several congressional hearings examining spikes in censorship, said constituents told him Pentagon school officials also took down photos of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Susan B. Anthony.  He blasted Hegseth in a social media post that amplified student walkouts to protest what he labeled “Orwellian” book removals.

“Instead of removing books from the shelves about America’s history and constitutional values,” he wrote, “Secretary Hegseth should try reading them.”