Author Ryan Holiday was going to give an address to the Naval Academy — until the military branch discovered he was going to reference the academy’s recent sweeping book ban.
For years Holiday has been giving lectures on the virtues of Stoicism — he hosts a podcast called The Daily Stoic — and planned on speaking to the sophomores this week on the “theme of wisdom.” But the Navy canceled those plans an hour before he was set to speak, he said in a New York Times op-ed Saturday.
Ahead of his address, he sent over his prepared slides, which included a reference to the academy’s removal of 381 books.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools, prompting schools to pull books from classrooms that don’t align with Trump’s agenda. Although the Naval Academy is a college, in March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the school to review its books at the Nimitz Library to ensure that it complies with the president’s order.
On April 4, the Navy issued a press release listing the hundreds of books that were removed. That list includes How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
According to Holiday, his reference to the book ban made some at the school “extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout” the president’s order. He was asked to remove them from his speech; he declined and it was cancelled, he wrote.
The school “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told the Times. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”
“I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble,” Holiday wrote in the op-ed. “I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.”
He walked through some of his prepared remarks, which included making the point that there was political pressure in the 1950s to pull books from the shelves, but then-President Dwight Eisenhower refrained from doing so.
“My idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing,” the president told reporters shortly after his 1953 inauguration. Eisenhower then pointed to all of the materials that circulated before World War II that went unread but could have perhaps helped anticipate the tragedies that were about to strike. “What I am talking about is let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government, and let’s [not] be afraid of its weaknesses as well as its strength,” he said.
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was not among the books pulled from the library, Holiday noted. “As heinous as that book is, it should be accessible to scholars and students of history. However, this makes the removal of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings inexplicable,” he wrote. “Whatever one thinks of D.E.I., we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past.”
