I recently attended the Naval Academy football game against Louisiana Tech at Navy Marine Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland. During the nationally televised football game, the Navy ran a commercial meant to promote interest in the USNA to high school students and college-aged men and women. However, it was an affirmative action puff piece and grossly misleading. The midshipmen and women in the ad were all minorities; not one Caucasian was represented – male or female and the Navy was selling atypical Navy jobs: Astronaut, Blue Angel pilot, doctor.

The Navy is producing an affirmative action ad that misrepresents what the Naval Academy is really about. Why?

The Naval Academy has made it clear very that they are aggressively pushing Affirmative Action standards: lowering SAT score requirements for minorities, allowing some female Midshipmen to slack off or entirely skip out on their physical requirements, which are already dramatically lower then the men’s physical requirement expectations, and allowing athletes to get out of many of the military requirements of attending the USNA.

The problem with trying to level the playing field or “equalize” qualifications is that lowered expectations equalize only downward.

We see this on nearly every college campus. However, with the military academies, the effect is that they are undermining the very activity they seek to promote. Equalizing the requirements for males and females at military academies was tricky business to begin with. Wanting academy graduates to reflect the enlisted population more closely is not a bad goal either, but lowering requirements to achieve this goal is misguided and detrimental.

Today, the unfortunate result is that by allowing young men and women into the Naval Academy by lowering the high standards for only certain groups, the Navy has undermined itself. Affirmative Action laws and regulations have involved the use of preferential treatment, privilege, and set asides to achieve “workforce diversity,” and now our military leadership has been compromised. They have deemed certain ethnic groups and women unable to compete before they ever get to the Academy.

Affirmative Action has made a mockery of talent and instead, dragged down the very people its supporters claim to assist.

Affirmative Action is not synonymous with “civil rights” or “diversity.” As Ward Connerly so aptly explains, “Every American has the right to expect to be treated equally in the public domain — voting, education, employment, contracting — when that individual interacts with his or her government. Thus, “civil rights” are not just for black people. They are for every American and are basic rights to be applied by every government agency operating with taxpayer funds.”

Race and gender preferences have no place at our military academies. However, it is sneakier than that. A black candidate with B and C grades, having no particular leadership qualities, and 500 on both portions of the SAT, is virtually guaranteed admittance. A white student, who’s not an athlete, with similar scores is deemed not qualified. Many black and minority students are admitted to the Naval Academy through remedial training at the Naval Academy Preparatory School (NAPS) in Newport, R.I., which is a one-year post-secondary school. Finishing the year with a 2.0 GPA, a C average, almost guarantees admission to the academy. And sometimes, when students don’t make the 2.0 GPA target, the target is “renegotiated” downward. Minority applicants with SAT scores down to the 300s and with Cs and Ds grades (and no particular leadership or athletics) are also admitted after a remedial year at the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

Bruce Fleming, an English Professor at the Naval Academy for more than two decades and formerly on the Admissions Board, has been an outspoken opponent of the dumbing-down of Naval Academy midshipmen through the Affirmative Action racial and gender preferences process. He has charged that the academy will go to great lengths to retain minority students. When professor Fleming charged a black student with plagiarism, he was not properly informed of the hearing and subsequently the student’s peer group found him not guilty. Honor violations by black students are usually “remediated.”

What has resulted is that scholarly minority students are resentful that they are lumped into the same group as the Affirmative Action class, and white students are resentful that they are held to a higher standard on admissions policies as well as retention policies. They do not dare complain about minority students and the unequal treatment, lest they be labeled “racists” and risk expulsion. Diversity policies are dividing.

By admitting poorly prepared minority and female students to military academies, the American government is behind the re-igniting of racial unrest as well as carrying-on the farcical public education and lack of preparedness that so many of our youth are subjected to, and relegating them to a life of mediocrity.