Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has told the U.S. military academies to “immediately cease appointing civilian employees to tenured positions,” according to a short memo he issued on September 29.

In the memo, which carries the subject line, “Refocusing the Military Service Academies on Warfighter Education,” Hegesth writes that to ensure that the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy remain firmly focused on a warfighting mission, “we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality.”

With his characteristic, histrionic aggressiveness, Hegseth claims that those mechanisms include awarding tenure to civilian faculty members, which he asserts “leads to academic stagnation, faculty complacency, and institutional inability to adapt to emerging needs. Additionally, it contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics.”

The memo did not address the status of civilian faculty already holding tenure, but it did instruct officials to “develop hiring plans that prioritize institutional flexibility and faculty contribution to the warfighting mission.”

Hegseth has consistently pursued a censorial, anti-academic agenda at the military academies since taking office. At his Senate confirmation hearing, he said, “We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy as a tour to teach with their wisdom of what they’ve learned in uniform instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities that they left and then try to push that into service academies."

Tuesday’s memo is just the latest example of how the Trump administration has tried to reshape the academies to fit its conservative political views and stamp out what it regards as “woke” ideology. It’s a move the Pentagon has contemplated for months.

By executive order, Trump has banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs and the teaching or “divisive concepts” and gender ideology and told the academies they are “required to teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history."

Earlier this year, the Defense Department ended the option for service members to enroll in academic programs at several universities, including MIT, Brown, Yale and Georgetown, that Hegseth accused of indoctrinating military officers with “wicked ideologies.”

After the U.S. Military Academy at West Point issued a policy requiring faculty members to seek prior approval for any external speech they wrote or media interviews they gave in their official capacity, a federal court judge struck it down, finding it to be unconstitutional.

In addition, the academy faces another lawsuit brought by Adam Kalkstein , a civilian who has taught science at West Point for 17 years. In his lawsuit, Kalkstein accuses West Point of violating his First Amendment rights by forbidding him to teach about human-caused climate change, an order that required him “to defy science."

Last year the administration went so far as to ban hundreds of library books at the U.S. Naval Academy that offended Trump’s political views. Since then, many of the books have apparently been returned.

Of the five military academies, West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy are under the Department of Defense, while the United States Merchant Marine Academy is under the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, and the Coast Guard Academy is directed by the Department of Homeland Security.

The percentage of tenured faculty members who are civilians varies across the academies. Approximately a quarter of West Point professors, about half of U.S. Naval Academy instructors, and roughly 30% of Air Force faculty are civilians.

Although exposure to a broad range of ideas has long been considered to be a hallmark of a solid college education, that quality appears to have been rejected in Secretary Hegseth’s vision for military education. Viewpoint diversity for soldiers and their leaders? Not so much.