The National Intelligence University, a kludge organization masquerading as an institution of higher learning, is likely the organization that seeded some of the bozos over at National Security Agency who were busy sexting instead of decrypting. As all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies send their mid-career personnel (civilian and military both) to NIU for continuing education, you can bet that at least some of the chief exporters of the extremist DEI nonsense that took hold at NSA and elsewhere were graduates of NIU.
The Department of Government Efficiency should pay a visit to the NIU campus (really just one building) in Bethesda, Maryland. The institution needs a thorough review — not necessarily to eliminate it but to scale back its most ineffective parts and personnel. The goal should be to restore the focus on meaningful instruction and improve the quality of its graduates.
NIU is as dysfunctional as the broader American higher education system — and for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way.
NIU’s executive vice president, Patricia A. Larsen, has aggressively expanded DEI initiatives while neglecting common sense and academic rigor. Her approach puts the sensitivity of students over effective instruction, often at the expense of the faculty and staff. God forbid that any instruction ruffle the feathers of our delicate and sensitive intelligence community students! As a result, the quality of both incoming intelligence personnel and graduating students has declined sharply.
Since 1992, I have lectured at NIU and its predecessor organizations — the Defense Intelligence College, the Joint Military Intelligence College, and later the National Defense Intelligence College. Over the years, I have witnessed a significant drop in the quality of students and their academic preparedness.
Since 2021, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence took control of the university, the institution has adopted an inflated sense of its own importance (doubtless with some input from the CIA). The ODNI lacked a clear plan for the university and had little understanding of its curriculum. This mismanagement, combined with a shift toward imitating civilian higher education practices, has severely undermined NIU’s standards.
Now, it wants to emulate prestigious schools like Harvard or Virginia Tech, but, in reality, it more closely resembles a military staff school or community college.
NIU’s current approach includes lax, student-centered learning policies that allow students to influence what is taught. Admission standards have dropped sharply — the university no longer requires GRE scores and accepts nearly everyone who applies. Many students and graduates struggle with basic writing skills, such as forming coherent sentences with proper subject-verb agreement. Grade inflation is rampant, with 4.0 GPAs now the norm.
Today, NIU attracts government edu-crats who rely on PowerPoint slides rather than effective teaching methods. It has also become a degree mill for students who lack writing and reasoning skills. In the past, I reviewed their unclassified theses and papers, which often consisted of fragmented sentences on slides written in text-message shorthand — hardly graduate-level work.
The university’s staff has also grown bloated, consisting mostly of non-teaching personnel who try to mimic large state universities. This is absurd given that NIU’s student body is smaller than that of many medium-sized high schools. Entire departments contribute nothing to the university’s core mission: providing high-quality, graduate-level education in strategic intelligence.
Worse, management at NIU has long focused on increasing the number of graduates, regardless of their competence, instead of producing fewer but better-prepared intelligence professionals. A search of the public course catalog reveals no instruction in ethics. The emphasis on quantity over quality risks corrupting the entire intelligence community.
This lack of standards may help explain why the intelligence community includes hundreds of people like those Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired last week from the National Security Agency for using classified systems to exchange lewd and obscene messages. If NIU enforced higher standards in reading, writing, reasoning, and ethics, it might produce graduates with the integrity, discipline, and dedication that once defined both military officers and intelligence personnel. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case today.
As a result, NIU is as dysfunctional as the broader American higher education system — and for the same reasons. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The DOGE and Gabbard must take decisive action to clean up the NIU. After Gabbard’s swift move to fire the NSA employees involved in misconduct, it’s clear that bold steps can yield results.
To prevent further decline in the intelligence community, the DOGE and Gabbard should conduct a thorough review and eliminate unnecessary activities and staff positions that do not directly contribute to effective teaching. NIU’s focus must return to preparing the next generation of intelligence professionals with the skills needed for the art and craft of intelligence work.
National intelligence, Tulsi gabbard, Odni, Universities, Diversity equity inclusion, Dei programs, Harvard, Virginia tech, Grade inflation, National security, Intelligence community, Opinion & analysis
