Saving Our Service Academies

A native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Bruce Fleming graduated from Haverford College at nineteen with a degree in philosophy (BA ’74), and holds graduate degrees in comparative literature from the University of Chicago (MA ’78) and Vanderbilt University (PhD ’82). He was a Fulbright Scholar in West Berlin and taught for two years each at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the National University of Rwanda, the latter as a Fulbright professor. He has taught at the US Naval Academy since 1987 and is the author of over twenty books. His nonfiction titles discuss a variety of subjects ranging from military-civilian relations to the liberal-conservative clash in politics and from literary modernism to dance criticism, and his fiction work includes a novel and short fiction. His personal essays have been published in many leading US literary magazines, including The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Southwest Review. He has won an O. Henry Award and the Antioch Review’s Award for Distinguished Prose, as well as the US Naval Academy’s Award for Excellence in Research and a US Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Fleming has published op-eds in national media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, and The Federalist and been interviewed on CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, and the BBC. He lives with his family outside Annapolis, Maryland.