The Army's premier institution for training its most senior noncommissioned officers has barred its students from writing academic essays on topics such as women, minorities and other issues related to diversity.
The 10-month Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, includes multiple major projects in its curriculum, including two essays students were expected to work on for several months. Both projects were scrapped from the course and replaced with a single essay, a service spokesperson confirmed to Military.com.
That was because too many students had been working on topics now deemed taboo by the Army amid Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's scorched-earth approach to scrubbing references to diversity -- typically programs, policies and materials dealing with women, those with minority backgrounds, and LGBTQ+ people -- from the services.
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The change reflects the expanding Trump administration censorship across the Department of Defense aimed at erasing acknowledgment of those groups. It also follows a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump and internal policy shifts championed by Hegseth, who has made the erasure of those groups a core goal of his tenure so far.
The administration has labeled materials related to women, minorities and gay people as "diversity, equity and inclusion," or DEI, a term that once described efforts toward racial equality but has been repurposed under Trump as a catchall term used to conduct a government-wide purge.
"Students were required to select their topics and begin their research months before the presidential executive orders were issued. Some students selected topics that may have been construed to have a DEI frame of reference and were potentially incompliant," Lt. Col. Eugene Miranda, a service spokesperson, said in a statement. "Because of the time already invested in the writing requirements, the Sergeants Major Academy combined the writing requirements and extended the deadline to allow students to complete the work in alignment with new directives."
Soldiers interviewed in recent months have reported their concerns go beyond academic freedom, saying the moves the Pentagon has made placing such an emphasis on scrubbing mentions of gender and race may have enormous consequences for the military's culture.
"It's a very serious concern; it's the second- and third-order effects," one academy student told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It makes people feel like they are worthless, how their perspective isn't as valid as it was, say, a few months ago."
In recent years, the Army has tried to make enormous gains in professionalising its NCO corps. Part of that has been a growing expectation of writing skills and understanding the impact of policy. Much policy the service is actively working has to do with diversity, including gender -- such as revamping the Army's fitness test and adjusting standards for women in combat arms.
Sergeants Major Academy students may complete the no-longer-required essays and submit them for writing awards the service offers, but they still cannot approach barred topics.
"Students can still voluntarily elect to participate in an award category; however, [they] must submit a paper free of DEI content," an internal briefing on the matter reviewed by Military.com said.
That briefing noted the taboo topics included: "diversity, cultural perspectives, inequities, analyzing competing entities, including disenfranchised or vulnerable groups, in group favoritism, intergroup bias, [equal opportunity] recruitment, perceived inequities, gender diversity, cultural and ethnic differences, age ranges, generational gaps, disabilities, and discrimination."
The Pentagon's vague guidance on what is and isn't DEI has caused enormous confusion across the services. The Air Force, for example, had to reinstate a class for basic trainees on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Air Service Pilots, or WASPs, that had been cut.
Meanwhile, the services pulled out of an annual recruiting effort at a prestigious Black engineering conference.
In recent weeks, the U.S. Naval Academy removed some 400 books from its library, which include sociology books and texts written by Black female politicians.
The banned book titles include "The Second Coming of the KKK," a landmark book on how the Klan rose to political power in the early 20th century; and "Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory," which analyzes violence against women.
Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is still available in the Naval Academy library.
The United States Military Academy at West Point meanwhile has canceled two of its courses, a history course on race and an English class called "Power and Difference," which centered on inequities within politics and aimed to "prepare cadets to lead in a rapidly changing global environment, emphasizing the importance of understanding different perspectives and the impact of power dynamics," according to a course description.
