The Naval Academy Acts Like An Ivy

Welp, that's a race. https://t.co/0ADfjmlvk0

— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) September 30, 2025

It turns out that the US Naval Academy's admissions and disciplinary policies have become an issue in the New Jersey governor's race:

New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is facing fresh scrutiny following the revelation that her two children were accepted into the highly competitive Naval Academy — days after her campaign was rocked by news of her involvement in a notorious cheating scandal as a midshipman.

The Democratic congresswoman’s office announced in June that her two kids, Lincoln and Margaret Hedberg, were among nine students from her district to land spots in the Naval Academy, whichacademy Academy recordsd weerre unblemi9shed.

. . . Netizens, such as the Libs of TikTok, questioned how two of her children managed to get in at the same time in light of the highly selective process.

“What are the chances?” the popular right-wing social media account wrote on X.

Sherrill insists that everything was done aboveboard.

“In order to remove even the appearance of a conflict of interest, my children did not compete in my office’s service academy nomination process,” Sherrill said in a statement to The Post.

“Instead, they applied to the offices of the US senators from New Jersey, who also run academy nomination processes each year, and I am proud that they each earned nominations on their own.”

It is unclear whether Booker or Helmy made either of Sherrill’s children their principal nominee or if the congresswoman played any role in trying to lobby on their behalf.

Both Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are graduates of the Naval Academy, which would make their children "legacies" in Ivy parlance. But neither mom's nor dad's academy records were unblemished.

For days, the Sherrill campaign has been rocked by questions regarding her role in a cheating scandal that kept her from walking with her graduating class in 1994.

. . . When confronted with questions from reporters last week, Sherrill admitted she was punished in 1994, but not for cheating.

"I didn't turn in some of my classmates," Sherrill said, "So I didn't walk."

Sherrill seemed to change her story on Friday while campaigning in Plainfield.

During that event, she offered this explanation: "There was a test at the school that was stolen. I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test."

Sherrill then explained that after the test was completed, she heard the rumors of it being stolen. She said she was punished because "I didn't come forward with that information."

Via the New York Post,

A source close to a rival campaign questioned that statement.

“Nobody, including Mikie Sherrill, was barred from graduation ceremonies for covering for their friends,” claimed this person, who has reviewed the documents. “That’s a bunch of bulls—. Midshipmen were, however, punished for lying to Naval investigators.”

While no evidence has surfaced that the future congresswoman was punished for being untruthful to school officials, there are also indications that she has not been up front about what transpired.

Multiple midshipmen acquired and shared answers to a Dec. 14, 1992, exam for Electrical Engineering 311, a mandatory class for all non-engineering majors. The test was administered to 663 students, according to the lawsuit that involved Hedberg.

In a 2002 episode of CBS News’ “48 Hours” that reported on the scandal, one of the students involved estimated that “probably 80% of the people who took that test had knowledge and had seen it the night before.”

The day after the test was administered, academy officials caught wind of the cheating and went on to open a series of investigations — including by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), multiple Honor Boards (disciplinary panels), and the Office of the Naval Inspector General.

Ultimately, 88 were found guilty of participation in the dissemination of the exam, the Washington Post reported at the time, with two dozen expelled and 64 receiving lesser penalties such as late graduation.

At the same link,

Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill’s husband was also caught up in the Naval Academy cheating scandal that has rocked her campaign, court documents exclusively obtained by The Post show.

Jason Hedberg was one of about four dozen midshipmen who sued top officials at the Naval Academy, Navy and Pentagon in 1994 in a desperate bid to block an Honor Board at Annapolis from deciding whether they should be dismissed from the school.

“In compliance with the orders of their superior military officers, each named plaintiff was compelled to make inculpatory statements to Navy Inspector General investigators,” read the complaint, which charged that the students were denied due process.

The details of any “inculpatory statements” by Hedberg are unclear. However, his name is included in the 1994 commencement program, suggesting that he — unlike Sherrill — was cleared to take part in exercises some three months after the suit was filed.

This follows allegations from her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, that she has tripled her net worth since being elected to Congress in 2018.

The question of how certain applicants are able to beat the odds in the selective college admissions process has interested me since before I started blogging. On one hand, there's clearly a Navy old-boy network that extends to the Academy -- take the example of Sen John McCain, himself an Academy graduate, largely because his father and grandfather were both four-star admirals and Academy graduates themselves. He was a legacy as much as any Ivy applicant following his own dad and granddad. His pedigree apparently compensated for his poor early performance as a Naval aviator:

McCain began as a sub-par flier who was at times careless and reckless; during the early to mid-1960s, two of his flight missions crashed, and a third mission collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.

It looks like there have always been ways to play the angles in the Navy, and Mikie Sherrill and her husband have just found the latest version -- just like in the Ivy League. But a bigger, and much less examined, question is cheating. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at the Naval Academy?" It answered,

At least three large-scale cheating scandals have occurred at the U.S. Naval Academy in recent decades, impacting midshipmen in 1974, 1992, and 2020. Most recently, renewed attention has been drawn to the 1992 incident due to a political campaign.

In the 1992 scandal that affected Sherrill and her husband, the Navy's inspector general implicated more than 130 midshipmen in the theft and distribution of the exam. Approximately 80 midshipmen admitted to cheating, and 29 were recommended for expulsion. However, the numbers at one link above suggest far more were involved -- the test was administered to 663 students, and "probably 80%" had seen it the night before. That comes out to 530 students who saw the exam before they took it.

So, why were only 130 "implicated" and only 29 recommended for expulsion? I think it's because if the true size of the cheating problem were to become known, it would be beyond embarrassing to the Naval Academy and the Navy, so it had to be minimized. It would lead to serious questions about the competence of Naval officers and the value of an Academy degree. But the mere fact that cheating scandals reoccur at places like the Naval Academy is an indication that the problem hasn't been addressed.

But why should it be limited to the Naval Academy, or even the other US military academies? I asked Chrome AI mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at Harvard?" It answered,

Multiple cheating scandals have been reported at Harvard, with several major cases involving large numbers of students having occurred in recent decades. It's impossible to know the exact total number of cheating incidents, as many go unreported, but publicly known scandals highlight periods of high academic dishonesty.

These included the 2012 Government 1310 scandal, in which approximately half of the 279 students were investigated for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam; The 2017 Computer Science 50 scandal, in which about 10% of the course's enrollment during the fall semester were referred to the Honor Council; and the 2020–2021 Honor Code violations, a surge in academic dishonesty cases during the COVID pandemic, when the Honor Council reviewed 138 cases that academic year, with 27 students required to withdraw.

My own teaching experience in the 1970s was that plagiarism was extremedly common, and my graduate assistant colleagues recognized that plagiarism was so rife in freshman comp classes that it simply wasn't worth mentioning. But it was also understood that if the English Department, say, were to undertake serious enforcement of the honor code, first, nobody would have time to do anything else, and second, nobody would sign up to take English courses, so life simply went on.

The upshot is that truthtellers like Mike Rowe are slowly beginning to emerge who are questioning the value of a four-year degree, and cases like Mikie Sherrill are beginning to emerge who illustrate the corruption endemic in higher education, if not in public life overall.