A Military-Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest - The Atlantic

Over the course of several months, Pauline Shanks Kaurin concluded that she no longer had the academic freedom necessary for doing her job.

June 25, 2025, 8:18 AM ET

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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. Remaining on the faculty, she believes, would mean implicitly lending her approval to policies she cannot support. And she said that the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible.

The Naval War College is one of many institutions—along with the Army War College, the Air War College, and others—that provide graduate-level instruction in national-security issues and award master’s degrees to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. The Naval War College is also home to a widely respected civilian academic post, the James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics, named for the famous admiral and American prisoner of war in Vietnam. Pauline has held the Stockdale Chair since 2018. (I taught for many years at the Naval War College, where I knew Pauline as a colleague.) Her last day will be at the end of this month.