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Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate,” by Graham Parsons (Opinion guest essay, May 12):

Dr. Parsons’ rebuke of the Trump administration’s chokehold on academic freedom and its attack on “broad-based, critical-minded, nonpartisan education” at West Point attests to a rare character trait: courage.

I am a former Air Force captain trained under the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in the 1980s. My fellow cadets and I were exposed to every type of scholarship and viewpoint that our civilian university had to offer. Many of us availed ourselves of diverse courses in which we could listen to the opinions of our professors and other students and test their theories and ideas against our own viewpoints and ideologies.

I believe that those lessons, experienced in concert with our military training, made us better informed, more critically thinking Air Force officers when it came time to lead and follow our oaths to our Constitution while in uniform and beyond.

The fact that the Trump administration believes that hobbling the minds of our future officers is in our national interest betrays the president’s lack of confidence in the men and women in uniform who must be experts in leadership, history, ethics, democracy and our Constitution, warts and all. May we have the courage to defend their right to knowledge.

Wilder J. Leavitt
Bethesda, Md.

To the Editor:

On June 8, 1966, 579 young men graduated from West Point. I was among them. Some 30 of us were killed in Vietnam, and many others were wounded.

But our class continued to serve, empowered by our education and dedicated to the oath to the Constitution we took that day. Over the ensuing years of my service (in the Army, the State Department, the Senate staff and the C.I.A.), I watched with pride as West Point and the other service academies grew into world-class academic institutions.