The Trump administration has chosen a Marine officer to replace the first woman to lead the U.S. Naval Academy, trading out one history-making officer for another, well short of the typical three-year tenure for the position.
Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, who currently oversees the Marine Corps’ personnel directorate, has been nominated to replace Vice Adm. Yvette Davids as superintendent of the academy, the Pentagon formally announced Friday.
Davids was the first woman to head the service’s storied academy. Meanwhile, Borgschulte will be the first Marine to head the academic institution in its 180-year history.
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Davids’ tenure at the academy was shorter than usual and, in that time, the institution had become a focus for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his campaign against topics and materials that the Trump administration considers “woke.”
Davids presided over the cancellation of several classes on gender and sexuality that ran afoul of the administration, as well as the abrupt cancellation of a foreign affairs conference on campus over Trump administration directives.
She also complied with orders to remove and review hundreds of books from the shelves of the academy’s library that included titles by prominent Black authors — though ultimately only 21 books may be permanently removed.
USNI News was the first outlet to report the change of leadership at the academy.
It was not immediately clear whether Davids’ early departure was voluntary on her part, but she is not retiring despite a legal requirement to do so.
Federal law says that Naval Academy superintendents are to serve terms of no less than three years and agree to retire at the completion of their tour — and the Navy secretary needs to explain to Congress “why that officer did not complete three years service in that position” should that occur.
Davids took on the post only in January 2024.
Senate records show she has been nominated for a lateral move. Davids is slated to keep her three-star rank and take over as the deputy chief of naval operations for operations, plans, strategy and warfighting development, the Pentagon announced Friday.
Hegseth has to approve a waiver in order for Davids to continue to serve following her superintendent post, according to federal law.
Meanwhile, the choice of Borgschulte continues a growing trend of selecting Marine officers for posts that have traditionally been held by sailors.
In June, the Pentagon announced that Trump had selected Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Bligh to be the Navy’s top lawyer — the Navy judge advocate general, or JAG.
The previous Navy JAG abruptly retired in late 2024 ahead of Trump taking office after having been in the job only a few months. Then, months later, Hegseth fired the top lawyers for the Army and Air Force without explanation.
Military.com later reported that a retired rear admiral who served under Trump believed that all three military branches were going around the traditional selection process for their top lawyer posts and requiring nominees to answer screening questions about specific policies favored by the administration.
Bligh would be the first Marine to hold the post in modern history and only the second since the title was created in 1880.
Borgschulte was recently at the forefront of efforts to work around congressional stopgap measures that limited the Corps’ ability to give troops bonuses or move their families.
With other leaders, Borgschulte helped create an “IOU” system for bonuses in which Marines would sign a contract, bonus offer included, but if the service couldn’t deliver on it by contract start, they’d have the option to leave.
The service also began issuing “shell orders” to Marines and their families so they could start to set up housing or child care at their next duty station even though funding was not immediately available for the move.
“All these stressors, you’re just adding unpredictability,” Borgschulte previously said, adding that those delayed moves could result in gaps for receiving units and ripple across the force, leaving units potentially short in critical billets.
A Naval Academy graduate himself, he was designated as an aviator in 1993 and went on to lead Marines in various aviation units and in planning roles, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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