Academic search: Replacing vice ADM Ann E. Rondeau at the Naval Postgraduate School

VADM Rondeau would be found grossly wanting if measured by Attribute No. 1 of the United States Naval Academy's "Seven Attributes of Graduating Midshipmen": “Selfless leaders who value diversity and create an ethical command climate through their example of personal integrity and moral courage.”

Glenn E. Robinson, Guest Commentary: Time for new leadership at NPS

Admiral Ann Rondeau’s term as NPS president expires in January. Instead of extending her appointment, it is imperative that Secretary of the Navy Carlos del Toro move on from this ruinous appointment that was made during the Trump years, and appoint a qualified leader capable of moving NPS forward. ...

Both by written rule and long-standing customary practice, the NPS president plays only a ceremonial role in academic issues. Navy admirals are no more qualified to run academic matters at a university than I am to run an aircraft carrier. The president’s job is to defend the university and its resources. The provost ought to be and usually is a highly regarded scholar who is the chief academic officer at NPS. This division of labor has been clear for years: the president’s focus was on protecting and promoting NPS nationally, while the provost was focused on ensuring academic excellence on campus.

Rondeau understands none of this. As a result, she has lost the trust of the NPS community. In my 30 years as a professor there, no other president has been viewed so poorly by the faculty. Resignations and retirements have soared since she was appointed president, with some of the best and brightest faculty at the school either leaving or stepping down from leadership roles. Of the dozen people on her current “leadership team,” only the provost is a civilian scholar. The result is the creation of a centralized, top-down decision-making culture that might be expected at a regular military base, but would be the death of any high-achieving university. So bad is Rondeau’s leadership that the faculty have met openly to discuss taking an unprecedented vote of no confidence in her. ...

When the academic deans at NPS pushed back against these plans, Rondeau tried to bully them into pledging their loyalty to her personally. When they refused this outrageous demand, she eliminated the positions of academic deans, replacing them all with a single military officer. This was just the most dramatic of the many steps she has taken to marginalize the faculty at NPS.

Secretary del Toro is an NPS graduate himself and cares deeply about the institution, as do I. Rondeau should immediately announce she will not seek an extension of her five-year term when it ends in January. In any case, Secretary del Toro should begin the process of searching for a new NPS president: one who knows what makes NPS special and who will work with the faculty to rebuild the status of what has been the crown jewel of graduate education in the U.S. military.

Robinson retired as Professor of Defense Analysis in December 2021 after a 30-year career at NPS. A longer version of this was sent to the Secretary of the Navy in June and is available through the author at glennerobinson [at] berkeley.edu.

Martin Edwin Andersen, twice vindicated national security and human rights whistleblower and former assistant professor at the National Defense University:

Chile’s vicious far-right nightmare, 50 years on …
Case Study on Neo-Nazi Infiltration: The Pentagon's National Defense University and ‘Vichy Ann’ Rondeau, et. al

"National Defense University (NDU) Professor Jaime Garcia Covarrubias was convicted of torture and murder in Chile of two unarmed detainees in two separate cases. In August 2020, the NDU professor was one of those found guilty in the September 1973 murder of unarmed detainee and math teacher Rubén Eduardo Morales Jara. The other case involves Chilean lawyer Jaime Emilio Eltit Spielmann, who was detained and went missing on the 13th of September of the same year. It is important to note, given what continues in this pleading, that Eltit Spielmann was Jewish, and that key partners in the international terrorist organization in which Garcia Covarrubias was a rising star were intimately linked to a group of German Nazis in hiding in Chile.

"The information includes 27 August 1974 communications by the Chilean head of the DINA, Director of National Intelligence, Manuel Contreras, to the deputy foreign minister of that country. Posted on 31 March 2021 by the National Security Archive, a well-respected non-government organization, the letter from Colonel Contreras requested official passports for a trip to Brazil for twelve officers, including DINA agents who later were involved in the car-bomb murders of the exiled democratic General Carlos Prats in Argentina and former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the White House.

"In an email sent to me by retired Columbia University journalism professor John Dinges, one of the world’s leading historians on the Letelier murder and of the DINA’s international terrorist reach, among the “rogues gallery of DINA personalities” listed in the Contreras communication was Garcia Covarrubias.

"It should be noted that the future NDU professor later became a senior leader in the brutal dictatorship of Captain General Augusto Pinochet, the person about who then Secretary of State Shultz said in secret 1987 memorandum to President Ronald Reagan the CIA had “convincing evidence” of his ordering the 1976 assassination of Letelier and his American (Jewish) colleague, Ronni Moffitt (and someone who considered eliminating Col. Contreras to cover it up). ..."

https://www.academia.edu/60299692/Case_Study_on_Neo_Nazi_Infiltration_The_Pentagons_National_Defense_University_and_Vichy_Ann_Rondeau_et_al

See also:

https://www.academia.edu/95489658/_Secret_Wars_and_vice_ADM_Ann_E_Rondeau_now_before_the_United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Fourth_Circuit

https://www.academia.edu/50005882/VADM_ret_Ann_Rondeau_General_Mark_Milley_and_a_Reichstag_moment_at_the_National_Defense_University

https://www.academia.edu/49657089/LinkedIn_the_worlds_largest_professional_networking_platform_and_the_case_before_the_International_Criminal_Court_Adm_Ann_Rondeau_et_al