For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials.

But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start.

The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of “The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,” it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government’s foreign aid programs.

According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school’s leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president.

The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy’s library, and the school’s cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters.

Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy’s in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon’s chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief.

The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution’s academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon.

A Discussion of Coups and CorruptionEven before the presidential election, the academy began preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power.

In January 2024, the academy’s history department had invited Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, to give a lecture as part of a prestigious annual series that has brought eminent historians to the campus since 1980.

She was scheduled to speak on Oct. 10 about how the military in Italy and Chile had adapted to autocratic takeovers of those countries. The title of her lecture was “Militaries and Authoritarian Regimes: Coups, Corruption and the Costs of Losing Democracy.”Ms. Ben-Ghiat, who had written and spoken critically about Mr. Trump, said she had not intended to discuss what she considers his authoritarian tendencies in front of the students as part of the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture series at the academy. Even so, just a week before her lecture, an off-campus group formed in opposition to her invitation.

After reports about the upcoming lecture by right-wing outlets, Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, wrote to Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy’s superintendent, on Oct. 3 urging her to disinvite Ms. Ben-Ghiat from speaking to the midshipmen, as the students are called.

The next day the Naval Academy’s dean of academics, Samara L. Firebaugh, called to say the lecture had been postponed, Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled.

It was one month before the election.

Although victorious, the critics still were not satisfied. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist criticized Ms. Ben-Ghiat’s invitation, even after it was revoked. A group of 17 House Republicans said in a letter to Admiral Davids that the situation had raised concerns about “the academy’s process for choosing guest speakers.”

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Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled that she was told that the lecture was a potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law that limits certain political activities of federal employees.

“That would have only been true if I had been talking about current U.S. politics and Trump’s attitude to the U.S. military, and that was never part of the plan,” she said.

Ms. Ben-Ghiat now assumes that the lecture will never be rescheduled.

“A small purge was orchestrated,” she wrote in February about the cancellation of her lecture, “to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place.”

“It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more,” she added.