Pentagon Cutting Ties With Harvard
Other schools are likely to follow.
Pentagon News (“War Department Cuts Ties With Harvard University“):
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth today announced the War Department would sever its academic ties with Harvard University, because attendance at the school no longer meets the needs of the War Department or the military services.
“For too long, this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class,” he said. “Instead, too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.”
Beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the War Department will discontinue graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at the school. Hegseth noted that military personnel who are currently attending classes will be able to finish those courses of study.
The secretary said the U.S. military has, in the past, had an important and often positive relationship with Harvard.
“In 1775 … Gen. George Washington took command of the Continental Army in Harvard Yard and used the university as a military base,” he said. “From that time, through the Korean War, military service was commonplace at Harvard. There are more recipients of our nation’s Medal of Honor who went to Harvard than any other civilian institution in the United States.”
Today, Hegseth said, Harvard is no longer a welcoming institution to military personnel or the right place to develop them.
The secretary also cited as a problem the relationships Harvard has with foreign powers, and an on-campus culture that is incongruent with military and American values and interests.
“Campus research programs have partnered with the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “And university leadership encouraged a campus environment that celebrated Hamas, allowed attacks on Jews, and still promotes discrimination based on race in violation of Supreme Court decisions.”
He posted an accompanying video on X:
It’s not just Harvard:
While the War Department announced cessation of academic relations with Harvard, the secretary said in the coming weeks, the department and military services would evaluate similar relationships with other schools.
“[We] will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities,” he said. “The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to, say, public universities and our military graduate programs.”
The evaluation will be speedy: the recommendations are due early next week.
AP (“Pentagon says it’s cutting ties with ‘woke’ Harvard, discontinuing military training, fellowships“):
Hegseth earned a master’s degree from Harvard but symbolically returned his diploma in a 2022 Fox News segment. A Pentagon social media account run by Hegseth’s office resurfaced the clip in which Hegseth, then a Fox News commentator, returned the diploma and wrote “Return to Sender” on it with a marker.
The military offers its officers a variety of opportunities to get graduate-level education both at war colleges run by the military as well as civilian institutions like Harvard.
Broadly, while opportunities to attend prestigious civilian schools offer less direct benefit to a servicemember’s military career than their civilian counterparts, they help make troops more attractive employees once they leave the military.
NYT (“Hegseth Says Defense Department Will Cut Ties With Harvard“):
It is unclear what programs will be affected, and to what extent, but there are several graduate-level programs for military officers at Harvard. Mr. Hegseth’s order appeared to squarely target his alma mater: Harvard’s Kennedy School, which teaches government and public policy programs.
The Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, for example, has a national security fellowship for mid-level U.S. military officers. Retired Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., the highest-ranking officer in the armed forces for part of President Trump’s first term, is also a fellow at the Belfer Center. There were 12 officers enrolled in the national security fellowship this year. (David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, is a lecturer at a defense program in the Belfer Center.)
The Kennedy School also offers programs for senior U.S. military leaders. The “Senior Executives in National and International Security” program, for example, is open to U.S. generals and admirals. Mr. Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer with the National Guard, graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2013 with a master’s degree in public policy.
In the past, Harvard leaders have said the school is working to make the campus culture welcoming to different viewpoints, but have pushed back strongly against the Trump administration’s assertions that it is hostile to conservatives.
Public statements by the university have previously highlighted programs focused on veterans, or service members who are about to leave the military, as well as officer cadets who are enrolled at the university, but it is unclear if those programs would be included in the embargo.
When asked which programs, specifically, would be cut as part of Mr. Hegseth’s order, the Pentagon said in a statement that it didn’t have “anything more to provide beyond the secretary’s video.” Harvard University did not respond to a request for comment.
WaPo (“Pentagon cuts academic ties with ‘woke’ Harvard to focus on training ‘warriors’“):
Harvard had more than 100 cadets and midshipmen enrolled as of September 2025, as well as 78 veterans, according to the university.
[…]
Harvard had more than 100 cadets and midshipmen enrolled as of September 2025, as well as 78 veterans, according to the university.
While certainly in keeping with the tenor of policies the administration promoted in the campaign and have emphasized from Day 1, this particular announcement has taken everyone by surprise.
It’s unclear whether this applies only to programs for senior officers or also includes ROTC programs. Certainly, the latter are more expensive for taxpayers than those at state universities. While having officers trained at the nation’s elite universities would seem an unalloyed good for all manner of reasons, I’m unaware of any studies that have done a cost-benefit analysis. (The same could be said of the service academies.)
All of the services have sent officers to civilian universities for graduate and professional training for generations. Future West Point professors are routinely sent to select institutions to get master’s degrees in the subjects they will teach. A relatively small number are allowed to complete their PhD coursework, with the proviso that they complete the dissertation on their own time. (H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus are examples.) There are also strategist programs in all the services, some of which also fund PhD work.
I’ve worked with and for several officers who completed fellowships at prestigious universities or think tanks, usually in lieu of attending war college in residence. I never got the impression that they were overly “woke.”
Could it also be argued that top universities enrolled military and veterans who are perhaps underqualified. Kind of a DEI program for said military and vets? VP Vance as an example?
@Scott: I’m sure that they got a leg up. Vance was a particularly compelling story, given his family background.
In the olden days, at least, it was widely believed that Princeton, Duke, Ohio State, North Carolina, and other feeder programs for West Point were very understanding of the compressed timelines officer students were under and accommodated accordingly. The degree to which that was true is largely unknowable.
My initial, albeit snarky, observation is: how elite is this Harvard place if it gave Hegseth a master’s degree?
But in all seriousness, this is just a foolish move that is part of the anti-intellect, anti-expertise philosophy of this administration.
I guess there isn’t enough kinetic lethality in Harvard Yard, let alone a sufficient warrior ethos. Probably a lot of beardos and fatties running around as well.
@James Joyner: I couldn’t resist the snark. I’ve encountered enough GOs to appreciate their knowledge, brains, and skills. Then again, there are some…well, let’s not talk about them.
It would seem Whiskey Pete’s idea of a warrior is a troglodyte armed with a club and a dumb expression on his face.
“Thinking men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any thinking men.” The Fountainhead.
There is a German word for what they want,Kadavergehorsam. Basically it means total and absolute obedience to higher officers. It means that following orders is a legitimate response to being questioned.