A Military Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest

June 25, 2025 1 min read

Tom Nichols
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have “the academic freedom to do my job.” 

But now she’s leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. 

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