Hegseth’s task force on senior service colleges had a 90-day clock because ideology does not need an open-ended review. Universities have given ideology an open-ended review for years and called it academic freedom. The Pentagon is checking whether curricula still serve national security. Campuses rarely check whether curricula still serve any coherent public purpose. One institution is willing to remove people who resist the mission. The other protects those people from removal. The Pentagon under Hegseth’s leadership is treating low standards as a leadership failure. Campuses treat the same failure as a social-justice necessity. Officers who insisted on diversity metrics over performance were removed from key billets. Faculty who insist on the same metrics are granted tenure. The piece outlines the leadership and curricular changes that would mirror the Pentagon approach. Those changes are feasible once the funding conditions are clear.

Do men and women communicate differently? A little true humor-- when we may need it. Open the organizational communication textbooks they assign in the university system and the professors who wrote them will tell you no. Same process. Same needs. Same everything. Just two humans exchanging information like identical printers. I used to tell my students we were skipping “That” Chapter. The one that refused to deal in reality. I eventually figured out why those professors were so sure: most of them had never actually done the job they were writing about. I had. Thirty years in executive management before I ever walked into a classroom. Fortune-level companies. Real people. Real conversations. Real consequences. So I had a slightly different data set. Proof, from my living room: Tony, my husband’s best friend of 40 years — both senior guys from Fortune 100 companies — dumps his girlfriend of seven years. Calls Sutton, my husband. Can he crash for a few days? Door’s open. After dinner we sit down to watch football. After the first game I’m done. I want a book and some quiet alone time. Three hours later Sutton comes to bed. Me: So… what happened? Sutton: The Dolphins lost. Me: Not the game. Tony. The girlfriend. Sutton: I don’t know. Me: What do you mean you don't know, you didn’t ask? Sutton: If he wanted to tell me, he would have. Me: You have to ask so you can offer help and solace. Sutton: Guys don’t do that. If he wanted help, he’d ask for it. Next day I walk into class and tell the story. Ask the guys to raise their hands if they would have done exactly what Sutton did. Almost every hand goes up. “Not my business.” “We were there to watch a game, not jabber.” Then I ask the women. They detonated. “He asked to stay at your house because he just got dumped.” “That’s your best friend. That’s what friends are for.” And that, class, is why we skipped Chapter 7. The textbook said communication is the same. The room said otherwise. The Dolphins still lost, and I never found out why they broke up! The fundamental question however, was, indeed, answered: do men and women communicate the same? Hell no!