Books Deemed Unfit to Serve: Almost 400 Books Purged from Naval Academy Library

Human Rights Research Center
6 days ago
8 min read

Author: Lily Marino July 2, 2025

Banning books is a contentious issue, both in the eyes of public opinion and constitutional law, but in recent American memory it has largely been confined to elementary and high schools along with public library systems. Colleges, universities, and other institutions dedicated to higher education have been largely left to their own devices, protected by their status and a respect for independent academia. In a overt shift at the end of March, the Nimitz Library at the Naval Academy in Annapolis was ordered by Pentagon leadership to review and cull the university's library for any books with reference to DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) practices, gender ideology, race theory and racism, or feminism in compliance with executive orders published by President Trump in January. After a review of an initial list of over 900 books, the Library and University authorities purged 381 books from its catalog, both physical and online, completely removing students’ access to them.

Image of the United States Naval Academy in Maryland

The memo that called for the review and removal cited rhetoric from two of President Trump’s executive orders. The first was published on January 20, 2025 and is titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” This order calls for the termination of any and all “DEIA” and “environmental justice” programs, policies, and positions within the federal government, including governmental institutions themselves, government contractors, and recipients of federal grant funding. Largely, the order calls for these actions to be carried out via review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It directly functioned to counter Executive Order 13985, signed by former President Biden, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” It also ended governmental affirmative action, which had been the official policy of the U.S. Government since former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 in 1965. President Trump’s order on DEI initiatives served as the basis for compiling the removed books on the logic that the Department of Defense, and thus all branches of the military including their academic institutions, was a component of the federal government.

The second relevant executive order was signed on January 29th, 2025 and was titled “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” This order calls for an end to what it refers to as “anti-American ideologies” and policies that undermine parental oversight in the education of minors. Most pertinent is Section 3 of the order, which calls for a summary and review of all funding that directly or indirectly supports or subsidizes the “instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in K-12 curriculum, programs, instruction and activity. This inherently includes books specified for grade-level curriculums, and some institutions also take it to include books that are accessible to but not required for their students, including within libraries. This order, though not directly applicable to the military academies because it does not address institutions for higher education, serves as the basis for extending the changes called for within governmental agencies out to the curriculum and libraries of an academic institution such as the Naval Academy.

A list of all 381 books removed from the library was released and is publicly accessible online. The list reveals that the removal did not adhere to books on DEIA theory and instead included books with any connection to a number of different categories. Race, race theory, and any indication of American racism was a prominent common factor in removed books. This included books on race as a concept; books on American slavery and its continued effects today; books on the experience of minorities other than Black Americans, such as The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the Racial Divide; and history books on the Civil Rights Movement. These books include some titles that are obviously critiquing the state of race relations and institutional racism in the US, such as America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege and the Bridge to a New America, but others are exploratory sociological texts on race itself, unrelated to an American criticism, like Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters. The official analysis also ascribed the “racism” label to a book on Ku Klux Kulture, and to a book simply called White Supremacy Groups, both of which were removed from the library. Mein Kampf was allowed to remain within the library.

Books on sexism, feminism, and the American woman’s experience were similarly targeted, although not to the same degree. The records released by the Naval Academy identified The Gendered Society as including information on both psychological sex differences and sex discrimination, resulting in its ban. Gothic Feminism: the Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës and a book on how young girls were dissuaded from speaking in classrooms were both banned on the premise that they radicalize a woman’s experience. Perhaps most shockingly, the committee removed a book titled Memorializing the Holocaust because of the gender identity included in the identified subject of “Jewish women in the Holocaust.” Books on Black women’s perspectives in America were particularly targeted. This included books on the topic of Black American women, like A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York, but it also included books by black women, imbued with their own perspective, such as critically acclaimed Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Gender ideology was also one of the intended targets of the library purge. This predominantly focused on any book explicitly exploring the transgender experience, both in America and worldwide. However, it also included books on the gendered experience of youth, psychological analysis of gender dysphoria, and gender identity within institutions like sports systems. The review concluded that books on sexuality and information on the LGBTQ experience also needed to be removed. The Academy removed multiple books on being non-binary, gay rights, gay men and women both in America and abroad, and anything that could be labeled with the subject “gender nonconformity.” Even a book on the politics of masculinity, labeled with the subject of “sex role” was removed.

Many of the books that the committee listed as removed did not have a controversial subject as their main focus, but their presence was enough for the Academy to remove each book and all its information from the Institution. These actions, affecting the Academy’s catalog, have led to questions from the public, governmental representatives, and even some legal representatives. Official Naval and Pentagon spokespeople have responded to the scrutiny by reiterating that the military academies are committed to executing the President’s executive orders. In the weeks after the purge within the Naval Academy, similar directives were given to West Point, the Army Academy, and the Air Force Academy to review their library catalog and their academic curriculum to ensure they comply with the Federal government’s directives. In spite of outcry from democrats in the House of Representatives, this directive has continued to expand throughout May when the Pentagon sent a similar directive to all military leaders and commands to review and pull any books from libraries that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues.

In a recent case supported by the ACLU on behalf of 12 students in the Department of Defense school system, which includes children being educated on military bases, the plaintiffs argue that the bans on books and changes in curriculum in these K-12 schools violate their First Amendment right of free speech and expression. Parents have argued that their children deserve the right to have access to books that reflect their experience back at them while also giving them access to a diverse learning environment. Much of the same can be said about the rights of the students at the military academies. Time in a university setting is built to allow students to explore other, more diverse perspectives and to learn things they would not have had access to in their home environment. Preventing students from reading the experience of Maya Angelou or an account of the Holocaust, even in a place built to foster independent thought and intellectual curiosity, makes it all too easy for young adults to enter the workforce or the world without ever having challenged any of the views they were taught growing up. With this type of academic censorship, there can be no guarantee of an open, honest, or accurate understanding of history or the experiences of others in the world today. For this to be the case for the young men and women who will go on to be the leaders in one of the most powerful militaries in the world is particularly striking. It is not just a disservice to them, but a danger to everyone.

Glossary

ACLU: short for American Civil Liberties Union; a non-profit organization that defends and preserves the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in the U.S. Constitution. They advocate for these rights through litigation, legislative lobbying, and educational outreach.
Affirmative Action: an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women, originally conceived as an effort to counter the social effects of long-term discrimination.
Anti-American Ideologies: here used in the President’s executive order to mean anything that does not comply with the parameters of a “patriotic education” including “an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles; a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history; the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.”
Curriculum: the combination of instructional practices, learning experiences, and students' performance assessment that are designed to bring out and evaluate the target learning outcomes of a particular course or school.
Discriminatory Equity Ideology: here defined in the President’s executive order to mean “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Executive Order: a written, signed and published directive from the President of the United States managing operations of the federal government. They require no approval from Congress but they are not laws, cannot override federal laws, and may be overturned by the next sitting president.
Federal Grants: financial assistance provided by the federal government to support or stimulate progress for a public purpose. Many private institutions, including non-profits and research projects, rely on this type of funding to support their mission.
First Amendment Rights: the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, both freedom from an established religion and freedom to practice one’s own religion; freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition.
Gender Dysphoria: the psychological term for mental distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.
Gender Identity: a person's innate sense of their gender (frequently used in contexts where it is contrasted with the sex registered for them at birth).
Gender Ideology: defined in this case within President Trump’s executive orders as “[a replacement for] the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex”; defined by external sources as the belief that gender is separate from sex and can be understood as a spectrum of identities, separate from biological sex. It's often used in a negative context, particularly by those who oppose gender equality and the rights of transgender people
Government Contractor: a private institution, company, or organization paid under contract to provide goods or services to any level of government.
Higher Education: education beyond high school, especially at a college or university
Mein Kampf: the autobiography authored by Adolf Hitler and published as the manifesto outlining the ideology and goals of the Nazi Party.
Non-binary: in this case, relating to a gender identity that does not conform to traditional binary beliefs about gender, which indicate that all individuals are exclusively either male or female.
Race Theory (or “Critical Race Theory”): intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color.

Sources

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Books Deemed Unfit to Serve: Almost 400 Books Purged from Naval Academy Library

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