Thanks Roger.

Reading the list published in the NYT is like receiving 381 small gut punches, as it reflects the outlandish rage of Hegseth and his ilk. I cannot imagine what it’s like for you and for the midshipmen, especially minority and female students.

But being the eternal Pollyanna that I am, I’m comforted for a few reasons:

1. Any adolescent/post-adolescent midshipman worth their salt is going to be attracted to this list to find out why these books are banned and will hopefully dip their toes into at least some of them, where they might not have if they were still shelved in the stacks. This banning just begs for subversion.

2. Is the horse already out of the barn? What will faculty do when a midshipman hands in an exegesis on the significance of Kendrick Lamar’s “Wop Wop Wop Wop” and other double entendres in ‘Not Like Us’? Our new generation of warrior-scholars is probably far ahead of old farts like myself in internalizing what the ‘woke’ culture has been pointing to for the last 50 years. Will Naval Academy faculty be able to facilitate student attempts to clearly verbalize for us in older generations what they know to be true? Can this book banning help to further this along?

3. Finally, I’m glad to see that voices such as James Baldwin and Carol Gilligan are not on the list, nor is Malcolm X or other books by Maya Angelou. I chalk that up to ill-educated censors.