On Thursday, April 16, investigative reporter Jasper Craven visited the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts to discuss his upcoming book, “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” Craven covers the military and veterans’ issues for outlets such as The New York Times, The Baffler and Harper’s Magazine. He previously co-authored “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs,” which was published by Duke University Press in 2022.
“God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” expands on Craven’s previous reporting on the military’s role in forming American conceptions of masculinity. The book focuses on how military academies, such as the United States Military Academy at West Point, uphold and strengthen these cultural values.
Craven discussed the book alongside Visiting Professor of Philosophy Graham Parsons. A former professor of philosophy and military ethics at West Point, Parsons published a New York Times opinion essay entitled “West Point Is Supposed to Educate, Not Indoctrinate” in May 2025. In this piece, Parsons pointed toward the attacks on higher education enacted by the Trump administration, writing, “All it took [to undermine West Point] was an executive order from President Trump and a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dictating what could and couldn’t be taught in the military and its educational institutions.” He resigned from the school shortly thereafter and began teaching at Vassar College last fall.
Parsons is a major source in “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t,” in which he relays his experiences at West Point. The April 16 event marked a continuation of Craven and Parsons’ conversations, this time alongside students and faculty. Parsons offered his review of the book to the audience, stating, “It’s a chilling portrayal of how the vast military-educational complex, which includes the military service academies, private military colleges and prep schools, ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] and JROTC [Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] programs and college fraternities, came to be, and the consequences of the violent, dominative, misogynistic vision of masculinity it fosters.”
Craven explained in an interview with The Miscellany News that his decision to discuss the book with the Vassar community was not only influenced by his relationship with Parsons, but also by the complex dynamic between Vassar and West Point. “As I was working on the book, Vassar sort of emerged as this very interesting foil to West Point,” he stated.
Craven began with a presentation that detailed the long history between Vassar and West Point. In the mid-20th century, he explained, Vassar students often visited West Point for weekend social events; a number of Vassar students even married West Point cadets. He said, “This is obviously a very heteronormative, old-school, patriarchal idea of courtship and partnership and all of the rest.”
That changed during the Vietnam War, Craven explained: “Vassar became a hotbed of activism against Vietnam.” He read from his book, “In October 1969, 200 Vassar students congregated at West Point’s gates, where they handed out flowers to cadets and urged them to abandon their commissions. Some cadets snatched their flowers and ate them. Another sarcastically told a protester that he couldn’t speak because he was on his way to ‘poison gas class.’”
During his presentation, Craven referenced a Miscellany article, from October 2025, on the Vassar chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine’s (VSJP) condemnation of the Vassar-West Point Initiative. On Sept. 29, 2025, VSJP released a statement calling for Vassar to cut ties with the Military Academy, citing its involvement, as well as the U.S. military as a whole, in supporting Israel during the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
In February 2025, six members of the Military Academy joined Vassar students and faculty for a briefing on the Physics and Astronomy Department’s quantum computer. This collaboration was a key point of concern for VSJP, who wrote in their statement, “These college-sponsored academic exchanges between Vassar and WP [West Point] enable WP to develop technology that can threaten personal privacy, advance war profiteering, and automate genocide.”
Craven elaborated on how this incident aligned with the tension between civilian and military communities that he researches, saying, “When this was announced, Vassar President Elizabeth Bradley told the Miscellany that the West Point-Vassar initiative ‘allows Vassar students to understand and experience what it is to be in a military academy.’ And I think that there is something valuable there.” Craven argued that Bradley’s comment was indicative of a larger societal expectation that civilians understand military life, but not vice versa. He stated, “And I think that there’s something problematic with that, because…it’s easy, I think, for the military to pigeonhole and stereotype civilians in the same way some civilians may do. And from that can breed resentment and just many negative things.”
As the conversation progressed, Craven and Parsons turned toward the Trump administration’s current focus on military academies such as West Point. “One of the first things Hegseth did was set out a plan to purge the service academies of people like Graham Parsons. And, you know, you talk to experts on fascism and all the rest and they say, ‘Look, this is a pedagogical project. If you’re trying to instill authoritarian impulses, you have to start in places like West Point,’” Craven explained. “So Pete Hegseth has articulated a very aggressive, violent, domineering type of masculinity that he wants to inculcate in the military.”
In terms of whether this presentation of masculinity can be salvaged, Parsons said, “I’m torn. I wonder if we’re in a moment where there’s a lot of potential.” In an interview with the Miscellany, Parsons expanded on this sentiment, saying, “I keep thinking that the gender identity that this administration so overtly displays and conspicuously displays, it seems to me to be based in a kind of insecurity, like it needs to assert itself in this really grotesque, aggressive way… So that’s why I wondered if we’re in a moment with potential for, you know, new gender dynamics, new gender identities. Because it seems like they recognize they have to scream at you to get you to comply.”
Throughout the talk, Craven and Parsons, as well as audience members, confronted the complex reality of individuals’ experiences with the military. For example, Parsons told Craven, “Reading your book, one thing I wanted to say—I wish I could add an addendum or something—is that some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met have been West Point graduates or West Point cadets and I respect them. I admire them.” He continued, “That doesn’t mean I think the institution is great, but let’s be careful that we don’t reduce the people in these offices to some sort of stereotype.”
One audience member, who identified himself as a former active duty physician during the Vietnam War, said, “I found my patients to be extraordinarily commendable. And, to be perfectly honest with you, I wish we had more of that in medicine. Because what you guys are seeing as conforming, I see as commitment to a cause, rather than to money.”
When asked how he confronts these tensions in his work, Craven told the Miscellany, “American culture is profoundly positive towards the military in a way that sometimes veers on blind reverence… But this book is built on the experiences of many, many dozens of cadets who had very different experiences. There’s lawsuits, there’s survey data.” He continued, “There’s a tendency to cast off any issues in the military as the problem of some bad apples. And there’s no willingness to actually even entertain the idea that there’s a systemic problem at play, which is kind of insane to me. Just because the military is an institution that is built on violence, it’s absolutely systemic and it’s more extreme than it is in a lot of other places.”
Madisen Karr ’29 described being motivated to attend the event by her current work on a research project investigating conceptions of gender and sexuality during the world wars. Of the relationship between Vassar and West Point, she wrote, “Disturbingly, West Point seems to me to be an institution in many ways set in the past, and the ongoing relationship between Vassar and West Point is troubling in that it reinforces a history of gender hierarchies… This information was enlightening, and it colored my perspective regarding Vassar’s ties with West Point given their concerning history of abusing cadets—sexual and otherwise—and the gender-essentialist views which have been perpetuated by the military and West Point by proxy.”
“God Forgives, Brothers Don’t” will be officially released by Simon & Schuester on May 19.