The organization that accredits the U.S. Air Force Academy is examining the institution’s academic programs after multiple civilian faculty members resigned, retired or were fired, leading alumni to question decisions being made by the campus’ superintendent and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The Higher Learning Commission informed the academy, located north of Colorado Springs, in mid-October that it would conduct a review of its academic programs after an alumnus filed a complaint. The commission said it would give the school 30 days to respond to the complaint, according to a copy of the Oct. 14 letter shared with The Denver Post.
“Upon initial review of your complaint, HLC determined that the matter regarding United States Air Force Academy raises potential concerns regarding the institution’s compliance with the Criteria for Accreditation,” associate general counsel Robert Rucker wrote.
Retired Lt. Col. Kent Murphy, who filed the complaint, and other concerned alumni and former faculty told The Post they believe the academy is losing too many civilian Ph.D.-level instructors without the ability to fully replace them with military members who hold doctoral degrees and have the same teaching experience.
That means larger class sizes with professors and instructors taking higher class loads each semester, they said. And they fear the reductions could eventually lead the academy to reduce the number of courses it offers and eventually eliminate some academic majors.
Murphy, a 1980 academy graduate who served 25 years as an Air Force surgeon and a volunteer adviser to cadets studying pre-med, filed the complaint in October after hearing reports of civilian faculty members being let go or voluntarily leaving because of a constant threat of losing their jobs. Murphy said he fears the quality of education, particularly in the STEM fields, is suffering due to the departures.
Murphy said he hopes the Higher Learning Commission’s inquiry will get the attention of Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, the academy’s superintendent.
“They’re serious about this. They’re concerned. We are concerned,” Murphy said of the commission’s inquiry. “The superintendent thinks he can operate with impunity because of the current situation in the United States.”
Losing accreditation would not force the Air Force Academy to close, but it would deliver a serious blow to an institution that is widely regarded as one of the best universities in the United States. The academy already competes with the other military academies as well as Ivy League schools for the nation’s brightest students.
Bauernfeind declined The Post’s request for an interview, and Capt. Megan Morrissey, an academy spokeswoman, said officials were not able to answer a list of questions submitted by the newspaper, citing the government shutdown.
Morrissey acknowledged the Air Force Academy had received communication from the commission and intended to respond. The academy is complying with the commission’s “assumed practices for higher education,” she wrote in an email. “We welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with HLC, addressing any concerns and demonstrating our commitment to excellence in education.”
It is unclear how many faculty members have left since President Donald Trump returned to office in January and how many have been replaced.
However, in a news release published in August, the academy reported that, as part of the Department of Defense’s civilian workforce reduction, it would defund 140 positions, and 104 of them were already vacant or set to be vacated through the federal Deferred Resignation Program, which offered buyouts to federal employees. The news release did not explain whether the 140 positions marked for elimination would come from the faculty, administrative roles or both. Eleven of the 36 remaining people whose positions were to be cut were reassigned to new jobs on campus.
In addition, 25 faculty members left the academy before the school year began, and 19 military faculty members were added, the news release said. It did not clarify whether the 25 faculty who left were civilian or military, or whether they were part of the 140 positions eliminated through federal cuts.
“I can confidently attest we are maintaining the academic rigor, accreditation and high standards expected at the U.S. Air Force Academy,” Bauernfeind said in the news release. “Our faculty and staff are providing a world-class education to our cadets, and our institution will continue to produce officers ready to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving security environment.”
Bauernfeind, who was appointed in 2024 under President Joe Biden’s administration, ruffled some feathers when he arrived on campus, according to faculty, former faculty and alumni with close ties to the school who were interviewed by The Post. But civilian faculty began leaving in the Spring 2025 semester after Trump appointed Hegseth, a former Fox News television host, to serve as secretary of defense.
Hegseth quickly moved to ban affirmative action in admissions at the three service academies that fall under the Department of Defense and ordered them to pull books focusing on diversity from their shelves. He also vowed to eliminate so-called “woke ideology” and any programs that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion on the campuses.
Critics of the civilian cuts at the Air Force Academy say this political ideology has seeped into the campus culture, and leaders are mistakenly driving away civilian faculty by implying they are weakening military education.
“To think of them as left-wing, tree-hugging hippie freaks is not the way to think of them,” said Thomas Bewley, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the University of California San Diego, who served as distinguished visiting professor at the academy during the 2024-2025 academic year. “They provide a lot of context to what engineering is in the military.”
One professor who left
For one engineering professor, the decision to leave the Air Force Academy became clear after he repeatedly was told he could lose his job any day.
Brian Johns left his professorship at Cornell College in Iowa in 2023 to teach systems engineering at the academy. Johns holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in industrial engineering. He specializes in melding complex mechanical and electrical systems so that they work together, and his latest research involves integrating artificial intelligence with software systems.
“It was a great new adventure and a new challenge to take on,” Johns said of giving up his tenured faculty position for an assistant professor position at the Air Force Academy. “It was my way of using the skills I have in the classroom to improve our national security, improve our nation.”
But in late February — in the spring semester of his second year on campus — Johns, who never served in the military, was pulled into an office by a supervisor and told that he would be fired the next day because of the federal government’s job cuts. Johns did not understand why he would be among the first to lose his job, as he was no longer on probation as a new hire and his performance reviews had been excellent.
A federal judge intervened and the government firings, including Johns’, were put on hold.
Still, talk of layoffs and firings continued.
“We had meetings where the superintendent told us a lot of departments were going to look like Swiss cheese when it was over,” Johns said. “It was not very reassuring, to be honest.
“From then on, it was, ‘Is this the Friday? Is next Friday going to be the day?’ It was creating a lot of anxiety,” he said. “The not knowing was worse than the firing. What am I going to do to my family?”
In late spring, Johns found an opening in the engineering department at Colorado State University. He applied and accepted a job as a teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he started this fall.
As far as Johns knows, he is the only civilian faculty member to leave the academy’s mechanical engineering department, but he also knows that he was not replaced, which means the current faculty had to pick up his 300- and 400-level courses, teaching juniors and seniors how to design complex warfighting systems.
Those courses need to be taught by someone with a doctorate degree, he said.
“It’s just messy,” Johns said. “Everybody’s trying to do their best there, but a lot of these decisions are made outside of their control, whether it’s coming from the secretary of defense — or the secretary of war, as we are calling him now — or the superintendent. We don’t know who’s making these decisions.”
Johns said people on the faculty now live in fear of retaliation and are afraid to speak out. Academic freedom is gone, he said. And the instructors who are not in the military are not getting paid because of the government shutdown.
“I’m thanking my lucky stars I got out of there,” he said.
The importance of accreditation
The Higher Learning Commission’s accreditation is important because it assures students and prospective students that they will receive a quality education.
The commission does not comment on inquiries into any academic programs, spokeswoman Laura Janota said. If the commission were to take any action against the academy, it would be posted online.
The commission has accredited the Air Force Academy since 1959, and the accreditation was reaffirmed during the 2018-2019 school year, according to the commission’s website. The academy is due for its next formal review during the 2028-2029 academic year.
The academy needs accreditation to attract top-notch students, said Anthony Aretz, who graduated from there in 1980 and later served as president at two universities. The Air Force often sends its officers to law school, medical school or to earn master’s and doctoral degrees, but their credits from the academy would no longer transfer to another university if it lost accreditation, he said.
“If the cadet is a graduate but the academy is not accredited, the other college wouldn’t accept their degree,” he said. “The academies hold a unique position in our country. They’re valued for their quality and how they prepare leaders for our Department of Defense and the rest of our country. You don’t want to lose that prestige that attracts those types of students.”
Accreditation organizations like the Higher Learning Commission operate independently of the federal government, so its investigators should be immune to political influence, Aretz said.
The departure of civilian faculty and a shortage of military replacements have led to larger class sizes, Aretz said. And instructors are teaching more courses than usual. If the cuts continue, the academy could be forced to drop some courses from its curriculum, and eventually, some majors, he said.
The academy’s August news release said all majors remained intact for the 2025-2026 school year, and that it had added four new classes to a list of 750 offered, plus three new minors.
The Air Force Academy’s website said the student-to-faculty ratio is eight to one for the more than 4,100 cadets on campus. The Higher Learning Commission’s latest data, which is from 2023, shows 234 faculty members.
Janota said the commission does not have a specific formula for the number of Ph.D.-holding instructors a campus needs in order to provide an adequate education to its students.
Accreditation inquiries typically are tight-lipped, and if the commission determines the academy has a sufficient number of faculty members, the review never will become public, Aretz said.
The first step is what the commission is doing now, which is asking the academy’s leadership to respond to the complaint. The commission could follow up with more questions and could eventually send a team of inspectors to the campus to question the administration, faculty and students, Aretz said.
“They’re there to help institutions maintain their academic quality,” he said.
The role of civilian instructors
At the Air Force Academy, the majority of the faculty are in the Air Force.
Their experiences at bases around the world and in warfighting are valued in the classroom. To teach there, they must hold at least a master’s degree and a rank of captain or higher. Most rotate in for a three-year assignment before they return to the fighting force. Some go on to earn doctorate degrees and return to teach at the academy throughout their careers.
The academy also hires non-military faculty, who bring expertise from years of classroom experience, scholarship and research. Those faculty often are the glue that holds a department together, helping new uniformed instructors learn how to run a classroom and keep the course curriculum on track, Bewley said.
“The civilian professors there really anchor the programs,” Bewley said. “They are really the backbone.”
Many of those civilian faculty members served in the Air Force and then, after retiring, brought their doctorate degrees back to teach the military branch’s future officers.
But Hegseth has vowed to oust anyone with “woke ideology” and has mistakenly determined that civilian faculty are a problem, Bewley said. Engineers do not weave diversity, equity and inclusion into lesson plans about aircraft mechanics, missile designs and satellite technology, he said.
“The fish is rotting from the head down,” said retired Brig. Gen. Martin France, a 1981 academy graduate who previously served as chairman of the school’s astronautical engineering program. “Obviously, none of the changes that would revert the academy back to a higher-quality academic program are going to be allowed or endorsed, given who we have as the secretary of defense and the president. A lot of this is part of the anti-woke agenda. Unfortunately, I don’t have any great hope of anything changing under this administration.”
France, who rotated in and out of the academy’s faculty during his 37-year career, said he agrees with the idea of having more Air Force officers with doctoral degrees on faculty. But the method used by Bauernfeind and the Trump administration has cut people with little planning or strategy, he said.
“Replacing established civilian professors with active duty, in my mind, is that’s not in itself a bad thing to do,” France said. “But it takes many years to produce qualified people within the active duty force. You can’t turn a faucet on and have enough Ph.D. professors.”
Air Force officers specialize in highly technical areas ranging from flying fighter jets to operating satellites to designing rockets.
For example, the Space Force needs astrophysicists who know how to interfere with a foreign government’s satellites, just like the academy needs experts who teach cadets how to do that. But it is not easy to call up the chain of command and request a lieutenant colonel with a Ph.D. in astrophysics to leave Space Command for a teaching job, said Murphy, the academy graduate and adviser who filed the complaint.
“What we found out is there is no pool of military educators out there buzzing around waiting for a phone call. They don’t exist,” Murphy said. “You’re not going to get 35 fighter pilots to get a pass to go teach at the military academy.”
France added that the shortage of people qualified and available to teach at the academy does not stop in the technical fields. The entire service does not have enough Chinese, Russian or Arabic speakers, and those instructors are needed, too.
One current instructor, who agreed to speak to The Post on the condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation, said his department is losing multiple people because of government cuts, the shutdown and the general feeling of uncertainty on campus.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to teach the upper-level courses because of the lack of instructors with doctorate degrees, he said.
“You don’t have the right players for the team,” he said. “You don’t switch half your team and still have the same flow.”
Bauernfeind started making the cuts within the non-military faculty with no real plan for how to replace them from within the military ranks, the instructor said. It’s impossible to replace a professor with 20 years of experience with a younger captain with a master’s degree, he said. Even someone fresh from a doctoral program needs time to gain experience in the classroom.
“It’s a terrible shame to see this institution we’ve built over the last 60 years just be deconstructed without any real plan,” the instructor said.
Multiple people interviewed by The Post said Bauernfeind removed the word “educate” from the academy’s mission statement, and they believe that move reflects his disdain for the intellectual class on campus.
“We are degrading the value of education and it really is a step toward an anti-intellectual bias in our military that we can’t afford,” France said.
A U.S. Air Force Academy cadre yells instructions to incoming cadets during a bus ride on in-processing day for the Class for 2025 at the school near Colorado Springs on June 24, 2021. (File photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
‘A distraction’
The departure of civilian faculty came up during the August meeting of the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors, a body of political appointees charged with monitoring and advising the institution’s operations, including its curriculum, instruction and academic methods.
During that meeting, board members and members of the general public raised questions about the faculty departures as well as changes to the curriculum, according to minutes from the meeting and accounts from two people in attendance.
Four people, including Bewley and Murphy, asked the superintendent to pause cuts to the faculty until academy leaders created a plan to replace those who had left.
Another four people expressed concerns about world history no longer being a mandatory class for cadets.
“Lt. Gen. Bauernfeind expressed that they are still in the planning process for this potential change to make sure that USAFA understands the value of American history in establishing a common ground with all cadets,” the meeting minutes stated.
Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA who was shot to death in September while speaking on a Utah college campus, was on the Board of Visitors at the time.
During the August meeting, Kirk questioned the superintendent on how he was making sure the faculty complied with Trump’s directives to eliminate critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion from the classrooms. He asked, “How the Academy is ensuring compliance with the faculty to ensure USAFA doesn’t push the worldview of oppression, oppressor/oppressed dynamics, anti-western, anti-American and gender ideology,” according to meeting minutes.
That injection of political ideology is part of the problem at the academy, Bewley said. Instead of focusing on the actual problem at the Board of Visitors meeting, the conversation turned into “a political sham,” he said.
Kirk talked about DEI and critical race theory and “some MAGA drumming points to rouse up the base, but there was nothing really relevant to the challenges of how we are going to train our officers to develop the weapons systems to win the next war,” Bewley said. “It was a distraction.”
Concerns over cuts to the Air Force Academy faculty and the Higher Learning Commission have gotten the attention of politicians.
Spokespeople for Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colorado Springs, both of whom sit on the Board of Visitors, said they were aware of the commission’s inquiry. Both said they want to work with the Trump administration to make sure the academy offers a world-class education, although neither offered specifics about how to respond to the commission’s review or how to prevent more faculty from leaving.
The alumni and former instructors who are speaking out said they want the superintendent to pause staffing cuts and for the Defense Department to fund the positions that still exist, Murphy said.
They also want the secretary of the Air Force to form a “blue ribbon panel” of stakeholders with an interest in the academy’s success, including the superintendent, faculty, distinguished alumni, leaders within the Air Force and Space Force, and politicians, he said.
Murphy said he did not relish his complaint to the Higher Learning Commission, but he wanted to get leadership’s attention. Speaking at meetings and writing letters has not been working.
“I love the academy,” Murphy said. “I want the reputation to be pristine.”
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