By Guest Column Tony Lentini, West Point Graduate——Bio and Archives--September 12, 2024
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When I attended West Point in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, cadets joked that we got a “$50,000 education, shoved up our a** a nickel at a time.” Times have sure changed. Today, the cost of an education at the nation’s service academies has risen to an estimated quarter of a million dollars per cadet or midshipman, all funded by our tax dollars.
In the past, such an investment was more than worthwhile; West Point has produced luminaries such as Presidents Grant and Eisenhower, World War II Generals MacArthur, Patton, Arnold, and Bradley, and scores of other accomplished military, political, and business leaders since its inception in 1802.
But in recent times, things have changed. The taxpayer cost of a West Point education has risen, and the Academy’s moral and professional compass seems to have shifted.
The U.S. Military Academy was the nation’s first engineering school, and rightly so, because engineering is a crucial skill on the battlefield. Soldiers must plan and build fortifications, bridges, and other infrastructure and find ways to destroy them. However, over the last few decades, the Academy has become more of a Liberal Arts College, offering battlefield-irrelevant course materials in such areas as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, and Gender Studies. West Point now offers a minor in Diversity & Inclusion Studies.
Although sexual fraternization has been a problem ever since women were first admitted to the Academy in 1976, among its various “Affinity Clubs,” West Point now sponsors a so-called “Spectrum Club” for homosexual and transexual cadets based solely on their sexual........