Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said Friday that the Pentagon is formally cutting ties with Ivy League schools and other top universities, barring all active-duty troops seeking graduate-level education from attending specific institutions.
Military attendance at select schools has been canceled starting this coming academic year, Hegseth said in an X post, accusing schools of indoctrinating service members with an unexplained “woke” ideology.
It is not clear how this change will affect active-duty students already in the middle of multi-year programs.
The military’s professional military education system has “been poisoned from within by a class of so-called elite universities who’ve abused their privilege and access,” Hegesth said, and have instead become “factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
Elite schools, such as Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have “taken our best and brightest, the men and women who pledged their lives to this nation, and subjected them to a curriculum of contempt,” the secretary said. “They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness. They’ve traded true intellectual rigor for radical dogma, sacrificed. Seek free expression for the suffocating confines of leftist ideology.”
The Pentagon did not respond to Business Insider’s request for specific details on Hegseth’s allegations. BI also requested a full list of schools affected by the Friday announcement, which was not provided.
If a senior officer selected for graduate school is already a top performer, it’s unrealistic to think a one- or two-year program would fundamentally change them, said Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and associate law professor at Ohio Northern University who called the thought of such a sudden personal philosophical change “far-fetched.”
He also said it’s valuable to have troops and civilians exposed to one another, as it helps bridge the ever-widening gap between American civilians and their military.
Hegseth made the announcement on X on Friday afternoon, just hours after using the platform to announce that the military’s relationship with Scouting America (formerly Boy Scouts) will hinge on the nonprofit’s acceptance of Pentagon requests to change the program, including halting DEI efforts and barring transgender youth from openly participating in Scouts.
These universities teach service members “to despise the very nation they swore to defend,” and enforce a “creed of globalist submission,” he said in the most recent announcement.
A list of 33 schools undergoing DoD review emerged online last week after an Army JAG notified active-duty troops and prospective students that certain schools may no longer be available to them and advised troops to “have a backup plan.”
That leaked guidance noted that Harvard was “fully off limits,” a reflection of the Pentagon’s previous decision to sever ties with Harvard University. Hegseth, who has a master’s degree from Harvard, accused it of being “one of the red-hot centers of Hate America activism.” Other schools were marked as risks.
One prospective student on active duty who hopes to attend one of the schools previously marked for review by the Pentagon told Business Insider the latest announcement from Hegseth has deflated them and may contribute to their decision to leave the military early.
A new review is forthcoming for “senior service” schools and internal war colleges, the secretary said, “ensuring they are once again bastions of strategic thought wholly dedicated to the singular mission of developing the most lethal and effective leaders and war fighters the world has ever known.”
He did not specify which institutions the review could include, though schools like the National Defense University and each service’s war college could be targeted.
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