PEN America

PEN America today sharply criticized some Republican members of Congress for their recent actions scrutinizing academic decision-making at the Naval Academy, including insinuating that an invitation to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to deliver a lecture could violate federal law, which led to the event’s cancellation.

A leading expert on authoritarianism and history professor at New York University, Ben-Ghiat is  the author of numerous books on Italian fascism, including most recently Strongman: Mussolini to the Present — which compares Donald Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, among other dictators. She is a regular commentator on MSNBC, and has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, regularly connecting his temperament and viewpoints to some of the dictators she studies. Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the Naval Academy’s history department to deliver the Bancroft Memorial Lecture on October 10, which she said would focus on “what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule.”

In the days before the scheduled lecture, however, the Naval Academy canceled the lecture claiming it wanted to avoid even appearing to violate federal law. This came after the urging of Congressman Keith Self (R-TX), who wrote to the Academy’s superintendent, Admiral Yvette M. Davids, saying the invitation was “a serious lapse in judgment” and that allowing her to speak, especially within weeks of the presidential election, would violate a Department of Defense directive that prohibits the military from engaging in partisan political activity. A group of sixteen Republican members subsequently wrote to Superintendent Davids, similarly labeling Ben-Ghiat a “partisan historian” and lauding the event’s cancellation. They also posed a series of questions to Academy leadership about internal academic processes, including how Ben-Ghiat came to be selected for the lecture, and how the institution defines “academic freedom.”