
US Naval Academy canceled author’s lecture that would have criticized book bans
CNN
The US Naval Academy canceled a lecture that author Ryan Holiday was scheduled to give to students there last week after he refused to remove slides from his planned presentation that criticized the academy’s decision to remove nearly 400 books from its main library.
The US Naval Academy canceled a lecture that author Ryan Holiday was scheduled to give to students there last week after he refused to remove slides from his planned presentation that criticized the academy’s decision to remove nearly 400 books from its main library. Holiday, a writer and philosopher who has lectured at the US Naval Academy more than half a dozen times since 2019, told CNN on Saturday that he was invited by the academy in November to give a lecture about wisdom to midshipmen on April 14. He had previously spoken to students there, including during the first Trump administration, as part of a series on stoicism and the pursuit of virtue and excellence. But an hour before he was scheduled to give his talk last week, as he was getting ready in his hotel room in Annapolis, Holiday says he received a call from the school asking him if he could refrain from mentioning the academy’s decision earlier this month to remove 381 books from the shelves of its Nimitz Library. “I said I couldn’t do that,” Holiday recalled. “I couldn’t have spoken in front of these midshipmen about courage and about doing the right thing, and then remove, I think, a very reasonable objection to a very egregious concept.” The Naval Academy, where students are military officers-in-training, removed the books in an attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order in January mandating the removal of all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” content from K-12 schools, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later said also applied to military academies. The banned books include Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Janet Jacobs’ “Memorializing the Holocaust,” and hundreds of other books dealing with issues of gender and racism, according to a database published by the New York Times.

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