I've posted before about my plebe year course with Prof. Fleming being one of my all-time favorites during my entire undergraduate years. So for me now - both as a former student and as a current fellow academic - I'm disappointed more than anything, and "disappointed" is a pretty feeble description.
Dr. Fleming began writing about what he saw as the shortcomings of USNA, I believe based on his own statements in some of those early articles, to shine light on opaque processes. He (rightly, IMHO) criticized an admissions process that was largely undocumented (though admissions guidelines and class profiles are documented). In the public and private university world, that would never fly, and I submit U of Michigan and U of Texas admissions procedures that made it to SCOTUS to support my claim. As soon as people have skin in the game, whether it's tuition or ever-dwindling state funding, people (rightly) demand to know how the institutions work, and how their sons' and daughters' applications are evaluated.
USNA is public, but its mission is different. USNA therefore has a case to make for assembling incoming plebe classes that reflect the nation and the Fleet. They could make strong cases why an African-American woman from Belzoni, MS with an ACT composite of 28 should be admitted over a first-gen college man from Brooklyn with an ACT of 30; or why a homeschooled boy from Lander, WY should be admitted over a shooting point guard who was her team captain and all-state at Des Moines Dowling. They haven't made these cases. In that limited sense, I therefore agree with that particular premise of Dr. Fleming.
But as for cries of killing tenure: I understand the public's bewilderment about a process that can also be opaque. Ultimately the purpose for academics earning tenure - and boy Nellie, do we have to earn it - springs from the very assaults on academic freedoms that we, inside academe, see occurring more and more frequently. Academic freedom with responsibility has been a key part of academe since the Enlightenment. Tenure lets biologists (like me) and chemists study flatworms* and write really unpopular essays because they're interesting and because they could lead to breakthroughs in knowledge. It allows historians like a colleague of mine to write books about Herbert Hoover as a man of letters, for whom the Presidency was a step down, and as someone who tried mightily to respond to the Great Depression, without worrying that he's going to lose his job if the next college president doesn't like the book. And it infrequently allows blowhards like Dr. Fleming to inflame with words. It guarantees that your sons and daughters will be exposed to ideas that they don't like, that they don't agree with, that make them squirm and question what they really think and believe. However, no idea that withers under scrutiny is an idea worth keeping, and that right there is about the only thing standing between us and beating the s*** out of each other because we don't like what someone else thinks.
*I don't study flatworms. I think they're boring.