NYACK, N.Y. - The longest-serving law professor at West Point rose to declare the school's new rules unconstitutional. Within moments, a uniformed colonel stood to challenge him.
Tim Bakken, speaking to dozens of colleagues at a faculty meeting, argued that none of them should be forced to seek approval before publishing papers or giving speeches, as a policy unveiled that day would require. "This violates the First Amendment," he said, predicting an end to West Point's professed tolerance for opposing views.
Col. E. John Gregory, according to Bakken and three other people in attendance that day, didn't want to hear it. "Stop talking," Gregory, a deputy department head, said in a raised voice, "and sit down."
Bakken, a 68-year-old who had never served in the military, did not sit down. He reminded the colonel that he had sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he accepted his teaching job. "It's like how military officers must not follow illegal orders -" he began to say.
"We're a military institution," Gregory interrupted, according to Bakken and the other attendees. "We follow orders."
President Donald Trump assumed power for the second time with an ambitious agenda to reshape norms and policies across government and throughout the private sector. His administration has moved swiftly to undo diversity initiatives that proliferated in prior years, reshape how U.S. history is taught in museums and parks, and assert a greater federal role in how universities hire and manage their funding.
To the president's supporters, these efforts represent an overdue reset for liberal policies that had veered out of control. To many other Americans, they amount to ideological, and sometimes unconstitutional, overreach. In little more than 18 months, the administration has drawn a surge of lawsuits alleging violations of civil liberties or other essential freedoms, a Washington Post analysis of hundreds of thousands of court records found.
One of those was filed by Bakken.
His confrontation with the colonel that day in March 2025 brought the clash to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the emerald-green-and-granite campus on the Hudson River that trains the leaders of tomorrow's Army. Since World War II, West Point had fostered academic openness, advancing the view that dissenting opinions are crucial in forming sound military judgments. But Trump and his top lieutenants, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, argue that West Point must prize patriotic obedience to authority above all else.
Seven days into his second presidency, Trump issued an executive order forbidding military colleges like West Point from "promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating" ideas that his administration deemed "un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational." It also required teaching that "America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history." Within weeks, West Point's dean introduced a revised "academic engagement" policy, stipulating that the school's nearly 700 professors - roughly a third of whom are civilians - must seek approval from their department head before they could deliver a speech, publish a paper or even speak on a podcast.
Bakken had never needed such approval before, he said. One of the first civilian professors hired at West Point, he had taught criminal and constitutional law there since 2000.
Nonmilitary faculty were meant to improve West Point's intellectual rigor and provide an outside perspective. Many uniformed colleagues never fully embraced their presence, however. Bakken, whose colleagues and students described him as a principled but brusque contrarian with a penchant for criticism, had often felt isolated.
Now, listening to the colonel's words about "following orders," Bakken felt alone in the room once again.
He had long argued that a military culture of unquestioning obedience, coupled with an aversion to criticism and a sense of superiority, had caused the U.S. to lose every war it fought since 1945. "Inside America, the last seventy-five years of military intervention have unleashed a flood of incompetence, hubris, and denial," he wrote in a 2020 book, "The Cost of Loyalty." "I have been living at the headwaters."
West Point officials hadn't liked that book, or much of Bakken's criticism. But they had never tried to silence him, he said - until Trump's second presidency, when West Point revised its faculty speech rules.
"Men and women die because other men and women do not have the reasoning, or the ability, or the courage to speak truthfully."
Excerpt from Tim Bakken's book "The Cost of Loyalty"
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth, a former Army major and weekend co-host of "Fox & Friends," said West Point shouldn't employ civilian professors, calling them "left-wing" and "woke." In office, he later told cadets that the academy had "hired professors who advocated for anti-American ideologies right here in these halls. But no more."
West Point's new policy came as Bakken prepared a new book that, like his first, criticized the academy and the military. But he was unwilling to seek permission to publish it, not from West Point, and not from Hegseth's Pentagon.
In September, he sued West Point in federal court. The "intent and effect" of his employer's new policy, he contended, "is to chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views" of West Point, the Army, the Defense Department, Hegseth and Trump.
A spokesperson for West Point declined to answer a list of questions, writing in an email that, "as a matter of policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation." Various West Point employees declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell likewise declined to comment, citing Bakken's ongoing lawsuit. But he wrote in a statement that Hegseth "completely supports" Trump's executive order. Referring to Bakken, Parnell added: "We are not concerned by the half-baked thoughts of a disgruntled individual."
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not directly answer questions about speech by Bakken or other professors at West Point, writing in an email that "individuals who refuse to follow the sacred chain-of-command … threaten the lives of our warfighters. Such reckless and dangerous actions will not be tolerated."
Although Bakken filed his lawsuit on behalf of civilian faculty, he saw it as protecting the rights of all professors. But they didn't seem to agree. After the suit, many stopped speaking to him, he said. His three closest colleagues confided that they'd like to help but their wives wouldn't allow it. One of his oldest friends, who had started at West Point the same day he did, asked him to reconsider.
"This policy is good for us," Bakken recalled him saying. "It will prevent us from saying things that get us in trouble."
Bakken arrived at West Point as a fan: enamored with the school's history, reputation and regular roster of Rhodes Scholars.
But he learned quickly that life in Upstate New York was different for civilians. On his first morning, he joined three new military hires on a tour of the academy. They stopped at the gift shop. Inside, Bakken could see candy, clothes and notebooks bearing West Point's distinctive logo. The new professor, clad in a business suit, began to follow his uniformed companions through the turnstiles.
The manager held up her hand. "No civilians allowed," she told the group, in Bakken's recollection.
Bakken knew he would be in the minority. He hadn't expected that.
Congress passed legislation in 1992 encouraging service academies to employ civilians. Until then, faculties at West Point and the Air Force Academy were almost entirely commissioned officers. (The Naval Academy already employed half military and half civilian professors.) Lawmakers hoped an influx of civilians with doctorates would boost intellectual diversity and raise academic standards.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had earlier pushed the idea. While serving as the Army chief of staff in 1946, he wrote to West Point's superintendent arguing that cadets should be taught psychology, with help from knowledgeable civilians, so they could handle "human problems on a human basis."
Bakken seemed the kind of subject-matter expert Eisenhower envisioned: He had worked as a prosecutor and as a lawyer in private practice, and taught at the university level.
In his job interview, Bakken had a swift answer to every question, said Gary Solis, a now-retired West Point professor who served on the hiring committee. He struck the interviewers as smart, capable and unafraid to speak his mind - an exemplar of what civilians were supposed to bring to West Point, Solis said. The committee unanimously recommended him, Solis recalled.
Before the interview ended, Solis reminded Bakken that West Point is not an ordinary school. Teaching there, he said, meant agreeing to abide by military principles: Submitting to authority. Following orders.
"Tim," Solis recalled, "had no problem with that."
At the time, Bakken accepted that, for the military to function, rank-and-file soldiers had to obey their superiors, he said. But he took the West Point job believing that, as a civilian professor, he would enjoy the same freedoms - to provoke, to debate, to criticize - afforded to professors at nonmilitary universities.
That was vital, he said, because one day, his cadets would be giving orders to soldiers. He had to teach his students to think critically. Lives depended on it. He would dwell on that over the years as six of his own students were killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"What is the purpose of being a military officer, especially a general, if you are unwilling to speak up about something that will help the nation?" Bakken asked in an interview with The Post. "Such as whether a war should be fought, or if the country should withdraw from a war, or if the country is losing soldiers?"
Over time, Bakken came to see West Point as its own hierarchical and insulated world, one where civilian professors were distrusted and treated as second-class citizens. More than a dozen current and former West Point personnel, most of them civilians, agreed with Bakken's impressions. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Their concerns stretched far beyond access to the campus gift shop. For instance, the Army paid for West Point military instructors to pursue graduate degrees, a benefit not offered to civilian professors. While military faculty had their pick of "move-in ready" campus homes with up to six bedrooms, civilians had sparser options for lodging on West Point's grounds. Military faculty received a year of sabbatical leave, while civilian faculty got six months.
"We were treated as not really members of the community … not full members of the faculty, in a way," former professor Graham Parsons said. "Civilians are fringe."
Bakken refused to remain on the margins. In 2005, he helped rewrite the faculty manual, granting equal sabbaticals and more flexible working hours for all professors.
Five years later, as chair of an academic freedom committee, Bakken led efforts to add a rule: Civilian professors who believed they were being disciplined or fired for something they said could challenge their punishment on First Amendment grounds.
The rule was tested almost immediately.
In 2010, assistant professor Dan Rice planned to show his cadets "The Tillman Story," a documentary released that year about the military cover-up in the death of former National Football League player Pat Tillman. He had been shot accidentally by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan, not killed by enemy fire as military officials at first claimed. The film suggested that Gen. John P. Abizaid, who had retired and was serving as a "distinguished chair" at West Point, had played a role in the cover-up. University administrators opposed the screening, according to Bakken and Rice.
(Asked about the episode this year, a spokesperson for Abizaid said the retired general does not grant interviews. A West Point spokesperson declined to comment.)
After Rice threatened to go to the academic freedom committee, West Point relented, he and Bakken said. Rice could show the movie - and invite the documentary's director, Amir Bar-Lev, to address students. But officials stipulated that an Army lawyer speak to the class, too. Bakken attended and listened as Bar-Lev told cadets that it was important to "speak the truth as you see it."
A few weeks later, Rice learned that West Point was terminating his contract. Bakken encouraged him to sue. Feeling worn down, he declined, Rice recalled in an interview.
Bakken thought he had helped secure free speech at West Point. Rice's termination, which he and Bakken believed stemmed from the Tillman documentary screening, convinced him otherwise.
So he decided to write a book.
A decade later, Bakken published "The Cost of Loyalty." From its opening lines, it frames America's costly conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq as failed products of an "opaque and secretive" military culture.
In the book, which earned a muted but positive critical reception, Bakken argues that the military lies - to the public and to itself, in major and minor ways. For instance, he writes that the Pentagon fakes bugle-playing during military funerals because the military lacks musicians. Officers hold up the instruments and pretend to blow while activating digital recordings tucked inside the horns, he writes.
More consequentially, he writes, during the Vietnam War, Army Chief of Staff and West Point graduate Harold Johnson developed doubts but chose not to air them. Johnson believed that higher-ups' plan to pursue large military campaigns against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong was foolish, if not fatal, Bakken writes. Johnson imagined walking to the Oval Office and resigning. But he stayed quiet, a decision that haunted him in old age.
Bakken quotes Johnson's late-life comments to an interviewer: "I am now going to my grave with that lapse in moral courage on my back."
"Americans are harder on football coaches who lose games than on generals who lose wars. … The U.S. military has possessed the most fearsome weapons ever created, and has often looked unbeatable on paper. However, somehow it has experienced great loss in every war in which it has fought since 1945."
Excerpt from Tim Bakken's book "The Cost of Loyalty"
After his book was published, most military and civilian faculty stopped eating lunch with Bakken, he said. One of the few who dared, chemistry professor Gary Washington, confided that his boss had instructed him to stay away because the law professor "couldn't be trusted." After Bakken left meetings with military colleagues, Washington said, they'd hang back to commiserate. "He doesn't understand us," Washington recalled them saying. "He can't make us change."
Still, West Point officials never sought to block the book or sanction him for writing it, Bakken said. Instead, they circulated a three-page memo shortly before its release, calling it "unflattering" and sharing answers to anticipated questions.
Was Bakken disciplined for writing the book? "No," according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post. Were his allegations true? Bakken, the memo said, represented "a minority opinion."
Why did West Point "allow this professor to still be employed?" The memo answered: "Academic freedom is essential to USMA's core mission [and] grounds our ability to develop leaders who can think critically. … Academic freedom means that faculty and students can engage in intellectual discourse and debate without fear of retaliation."
"The structure that creates the generals should be abandoned. ... The military academies should be transformed into national civilian universities. As currently constituted, they foster hubris, arrogance, favoritism, and mediocrity in the highest ranks of the military."
Excerpt from Tim Bakken's book "The Cost of Loyalty"
Bakken recalled that memo after Trump's executive order in 2025.
As West Point's new policy on faculty speech took hold early that year, library books were reviewed for references to "diversity, equity or inclusion," according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former West Point staff. An American history instructor nixed an assignment asking how the nation had expanded the idea of freedom over time and replaced it with an essay on banking. A cadet was told not to research the World War II-era detention of Japanese Americans. A staffer teaching a mandatory course on the history of Western thought was ordered to leave out Karl Marx.
Some changes came at the direction of higher-ups, while others appeared to be acts of self-censorship, the staffers said.
"There seemed to be this overcompliance for what they thought the administration would want to see," said one military lecturer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the president and the Pentagon. "Or at least getting rid of things the administration would not want to see."
A West Point spokesperson declined to comment on this account of curricular changes at the school.
Officials at the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy also scrutinized their teaching in response to the president's order, canceling or reconsidering classes about gender and sexuality, and cutting lectures about climate change and authoritarian regimes. Spokespeople for both academies declined to answer requests for comment, as well as questions about whether they considered limiting faculty speech as well.
At West Point, several professors, including Parsons, resigned in protest. On social media, Hegseth cheered.
At an August meeting, West Point's dean warned faculty never to share opinions with cadets during class. Bakken saw this as an extension of the academic engagement policy to the classroom. Bakken interpreted the dean's remarks as forbidding the kind of analysis he had given for decades, assessing the reasoning and impact of the court rulings he taught.
Four times that fall, Bakken said, he stopped himself from answering student questions because of the new policy. He did not answer a cadet who asked whether he agreed with the Supreme Court's ruling in Robinson v. California that punishing someone for a narcotics addiction is cruel and unconstitutional (he did), or another who asked what he made of McQuirter v. State, which held that juries may consider social conditions (the decision was probably wrong, Bakken believed, but influential). He declined chances to publish papers, too, including a piece questioning the legality of Navy attacks on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean.
In January, Bakken learned that West Point was moving to dismiss the suit. Col. Krista Watts, a vice dean, argued in a court filing that the academy had to follow Defense Department rules. Moreover, she wrote, the new policy protected West Point.
"These regulations and policies," Watts wrote, "permit senior Academy officials to be prepared for follow-up questions or concerns by the American public or by governmental leaders."
"Professor Bakken is required to comply," she continued, "as a condition of his employment."
Bakken feared that if the judge sided with West Point, he would lose his job.
At the first all-faculty meeting after Bakken sued, staff filled every seat. Except the four rows surrounding Bakken.
A few yards away, military instructor Maj. Benjamin Ordiway watched in silence. Bakken, Ordiway said, looked like an island. "This is bulls---," he told the teachers next to him. Ordiway, who has since retired, barely knew Bakken but admired him. He stood, walked over and cleared his throat.
"You did what a military officer should have done," he said, according to his and Bakken's recollections. "Standing up for the First Amendment."
Bakken hesitated, then held out his hand. The two men shook, and Ordiway sat beside him. "Thanks," Bakken said.
Bakken hoped he had conveyed how much Ordiway's support meant, even if he found it embarrassing. He hated being told that he was "in the right" or on the "right side of history," he said. Let a judge make that determination.
Such humility didn't always come across to colleagues, who could bristle at Bakken's certitude. Even his allies acknowledged that Bakken's prickly personality sometimes deepened his isolation.
Parsons remembered laboring for months over a proposal to allow civilians to compete for positions as department heads and deans. But when Bakken saw it, he threw it on the table in disgust, saying it didn't go far enough.
"He always wanted to be the critic," Parsons said. "He wouldn't be a member of any team that would have him."
Students noticed his stubbornness, too. He demanded cadets think aloud and refused to accept sloppy reasoning, said Lt. Brian Matthews, a 2024 West Point graduate. Unlike other professors, Matthews said, Bakken never used PowerPoint or summarized cases. Instead, he'd start class with a question. Such as: Do you think laws against hate crimes are effective?
"Then for the next hour, we'd go down the rabbit hole - one view after another - but at the same time, students weren't allowed to say crazy things with no background," Matthews said. "It was an environment I'd never seen before. It was pure intellectual curiosity."
Solis, who hired Bakken, said the professor has become "the dog who barks in the night." West Point needs that, he said. But it can get pretty lonely for the dog.
On his days off, Bakken usually dined alone on orange chicken and fried rice at an aging, financially distressed shopping mall that someone had tried to combine with an indoor amusement park. He read law articles in the shadow of an empty Ferris wheel and a Mount Rushmore-themed climbing wall.
Bakken had never married. For decades, he had lived alone in a series of shabby apartments an hour's drive from West Point. The most recent, in Nyack, was a two-room walk-up with no stove or dining table. He had always put work first - a decision he'd come to regret.
He'd begun picturing retirement in Florida, or by the lakes in his home state, Wisconsin. He envisioned the warmth. The water. He imagined buying a painting to hang on a sunny wall in a place he owned.
On a clammy day in mid-April, Bakken got home late after taking a bar recertification course in New York City. It had been half a year since he filed suit. He had no idea when it would be over. As he mounted the stairs to his apartment, thoughts of Florida surged. Bakken paused on the splintered wooden steps.
"Why," he asked himself in the darkness, "am I still doing this?"
- - -
A month later, in a federal courtroom in White Plains, Judge Cathy Seibel peered through her glasses at Bakken and his two lawyers, who sat surrounded by manila folders. Across from them was West Point's attorney.
"I asked you to come in," Seibel said, "because I have questions."
For the next hour, Seibel, who had been nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, grilled the lawyers on whether Bakken even had the right to sue in federal court. Why shouldn't he go directly to a federal agency with oversight of workplace conditions, like the Office of Special Counsel, as the government argued?
"There are a couple cases out there that don't look good for you," she told Bakken's lawyers.
Attorney Jonathan Goldman argued that transferring Bakken's case to the Office of Special Counsel would be a death blow. Trump had fired the agency's head and appointed an acting leader who promptly ended its investigation of the president's mass firings of federal workers. "It would be essentially asking the person who promulgated the policy whether the policy is constitutional," Goldman argued.
The judge next said she wanted to move to "the constitutional issue": Was West Point violating the First Amendment?
She turned to West Point's attorney, Dana Kumar. "What's the academy afraid of?" Seibel asked.
Kumar said that West Point, "as a military institution tasked with training military leaders of the future," had to ensure that the academy was not "misconstrued" to the public. Kumar asked the judge to imagine if Bakken gave a speech asserting that American conflicts overseas were illegal.
"No one is going to mistake that for the Army's position," Seibel said.
It could create the impression, Kumar said, that "that's what they're teaching at West Point."
The judge leaned forward. "Shouldn't we want … exactly those kinds of debates?" she asked.
Bakken could join a podcast to share his views about international conflicts without violating the policy, Kumar said. He just couldn't identify himself as a West Point professor.
Seibel said Bakken's West Point affiliation was the reason people invited him to appear on podcasts or write books. Otherwise, he was just "a random guy." She sat back, rubbed her temples and said she had "a lot to think about" but would decide "fairly soon."
Outside, Bakken waved goodbye to his lawyers. He wondered how much longer he'd have to stay silent. His new book, "Don't Say Sorry: Make Great Decisions, Without Regrets," was due to publish in early August.
The semester ended without a ruling.
As cadets collected their degrees, the war with Iran neared its fourth month, still without formal sanction from Congress. The number of people killed in strikes on alleged drug boats neared 200. Bakken read that top Trump officials wanted all federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements - and, later, that the Pentagon had barred journalists from its press office. To Bakken, it seemed the administration was finding more ways to limit scrutiny or dissent.
On May 26, three days after West Point's graduation, Seibel ruled that Bakken's case against the Trump administration could proceed. She also temporarily enjoined West Point from enforcing the academic engagement policy for civilian professors, forbidding the university from "prohibiting or restraining" Bakken from "expressing or offering his opinions, beliefs or views to his students" while the case moved forward.
The government could appeal Seibel's interim ruling. It had until late July to decide. The case could drag on for months regardless, possibly even leading to a trial.
Still: It was a victory. To celebrate, the professor drove to the mall, alone.
At the food court, Bakken told himself not to think about what lay ahead. He sat down with a foam tray and looked over his shoulder to the fake Mount Rushmore and its ersatz presidents. "In a smaller way," he told Thomas Jefferson, who founded West Point, "I've contributed my bit to the U.S. Constitution, too." Then he turned back to his teriyaki salmon.
Two days later, Col. Joshua Berry, the deputy head of West Point's Law and Philosophy Department, delivered Bakken a formal memorandum warning that he could face "disciplinary action" for working from home one Friday, according to a copy obtained by The Post. He also issued a second memo censoring Bakken for a "discourteous" interaction he had with mail room staffers in March.
Bakken contested both memos, which he saw as retaliation for his court victory. Asked about the timing of these sanctions, Berry deferred comment to West Point, whose spokesperson declined to comment. Berry rescinded the documents a few days after Bakken complained, according to emails obtained by The Post.
By early July, Bakken was hoping things had died down when he unlocked his office door one morning. He spotted something glittering on the polished surface of his desk, which he'd left bare the night before. It was a penny, upturned to show Abraham Lincoln's face.
He already knew what it signified, but he typed the question into Google anyway. "What is the meaning of a penny placed on an object in the military?" The answer: Soldiers leave pennies on grave sites to honor fallen comrades.
It didn't feel like a mark of respect to Bakken. He called a friend, a retired Army colonel who had taught at West Point.
"Is this a threat?" he asked. "I can't come up with any other explanation."
"This was a message to you," the colonel answered. "This is the way it works at West Point."
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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