One way to handicap America's military...

Political correctness hits the military....

The Naval Academy’s emphasis on creating a more diverse brigade of midshipmen has led to an admissions process that unofficially but effectively sets up separate tracks for white and nonwhite applicants in violation of federal law, one of the school’s professors has charged.

Academy English professor Bruce Fleming, who served on the school’s admissions board in 2002 and 2003, said academy officials have been careful not to set up a formal two-track system for white and nonwhite candidates, which would violate a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that threw out the University of Michigan’s race-based application process.

But that same kind of system is what has quietly been put in place at the academy, Fleming said, with lower standards for nonwhite applicants that make it easier for them to get in.

Fleming’s charge, which first came in a guest column in the Annapolis, Md., newspaper The Capital, isn’t the first time he has spoken out against the Naval Academy’s diversity policies.

But his June 14 column appeared less than a week after Superintendent Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler told the academy’s Board of Visitors that its incoming plebe class of 2013 is the most diverse in its history, about 35 percent nonwhite. At that meeting, Fowler said that diversity was his No. 1 priority as superintendent.