Naval Academy ignores students’ rights not to recite preferred pronouns

(The Daily Signal) – Something is amiss in Annapolis, home of the U.S. Naval Academy. A rot growing like kudzu across this bucolic campus is undermining the Naval Academy’s core mission: to prepare young officers to take command at sea.

How else can you explain the academy’s insistence that the Supreme Court’s holding that it is unconstitutional for colleges to use race as a factor in admissions doesn’t apply to the academy, as I wrote about here? At least in that case, the academy could make a straight-faced legal argument in support of racism.

More recently, Annapolis’ apparatchiks were caught inviting a problematic speaker to deliver—by her own account—a partisan speech targeting former President Donald Trump just a few weeks before the Nov. 5 election.

This is a clear violation of the Hatch Act as well as Defense Department regulations meant to keep politics out of our military. Although this instance is a clear violation of law, the Naval Academy has yet to officially announce its decision to “postpone” the speech scheduled for Oct. 10 by anti-Trump historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Ben-Ghiat’s scheduled appearance came to light only because of her public postings, and the Naval Academy acted under pressure only when it was made clear that her speech was a violation. 

And now it is coming to light that at least two civilian professors at the Naval Academy may be violating constitutional rights under the First and 14th amendments.

Two professors in the academy’s English Department have required students to state their “preferred pronouns” at the beginning of each class, according to students who complained to me. At first, students played along, but eventually they refused to engage in this disturbing behavior.

Instead of dropping the issue, the professors essentially taunt and harass the students to state their preferred personal pronouns instead of moving along and teaching the class.    

What do preferred pronouns have to do with the study of English? And more to the point, are these professors using personal pronouns in accord with proper grammar? 

As you might imagine, many students at the Naval Academy, and in the military in general, are patriots first. They’re not prone to discuss their personal lives in a professional military context. They have decided to serve their country in uniform and live their lives according to set of convictions. 

Like many other Americans, Naval Academy students are troubled by current trends in contemporary society—not the least of which is the assault on the Constitution, which they pledge their lives to defend. Compelled speech, in short, is a violation of their right to freedom of speech, already strained in recent years.

So, imagine how disturbing it has been for some midshipmen at the Naval Academy to have to deal with government employees who compel them to say something they don’t want to say and cut them off when they object.

This needs to stop for several reasons.

First and foremost, these professors may be, and likely are, violating students’ First and 14th amendment rights. 

Don’t take my word for it. Read the decision in Meriwether v. Hartop from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and ask yourself whether the same legal logic applies to this situation. Hint: It does.

In that case, Nicholas Meriwether, a professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, answered a student’s question in class by saying, “Yes, Sir.” After class, the student spoke with Meriwether and told his professor that he was transgender and demanded that Meriwether refer to him as a woman, using feminine titles and personal pronouns.

Meriwether offered to use the student’s last name, or any other name (including a female name), but politely declined to use the student’s preferred pronouns. The student became angry, threatened to get him fired, and filed a formal complaint with the state university’s Title IX office. 

After the Title IX office rejected Meriwether’s offer to use the student’s last name, any name of his choosing, or stop using sex-based pronouns altogether, the university—believe it or not—charged Meriwether with creating a “hostile environment” and put a written warning in his personnel file. 

As my Heritage Foundation colleague Sarah Parshall Perry outlined here, Meriwether sued the university for violating his rights of free speech and religious liberty under the First Amendment and violating his due process and equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment.

With respect to the compelled use of pronouns, 6th Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, writing for the court, stated:

[T]itles and pronouns carry a message. The university recognizes that and wants its professors to use pronouns to communicate a message: People can have a gender identity inconsistent with their sex at birth. But Meriwether does not agree with that message, and he does not want to communicate it to his students.

That’s not a matter of classroom management; that’s a matter of academic speech… Never before have titles and pronouns been scrutinized as closely as they are today for their power to validate—or invalidate—someone’s perceived sex or gender identity. Meriwether took a side in that debate. Through his continued refusal to address Doe as a woman, he advanced a viewpoint on gender identity. …

Shawnee State allegedly flouted [a] core principle of the First Amendment. Taking the allegations as true, we hold that the university violated Meriwether’s free-speech rights.

Meriwether prevailed because he stood on his convictions and was willing to take his case to court.

Midshipmen at the Naval Academy aren’t tenured professors. They’re just starting their careers as officers in the Navy or Marine Corps. They don’t want to be named because they’re concerned that if they come forward, the Naval Academy will see them as troublemakers instead of brave young men and women who quietly complained about abusive, legally questionable behavior.

The Naval Academy last week reluctantly “postponed” a politically toxic speaker after being outed for violating the Hatch Act and Defense Department regulations prohibiting overt political activities by members of the military.

Now the academy needs to look into this matter of compelling students to list preferred pronouns and order the professors involved to stop their questionable practices.