On Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a decisive order to “completely and immediately cancel” the participation of the Department of War personnel at universities such as Princeton, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown, and Yale, starting with the 2026-27 academic year.
Hegseth expanded on this directive, indicating that the prohibition would extend to “many others.” He criticized the higher education system, alleging that elite universities have been “corrupted from within,” abusing their connections with the department and failing to uphold their educational mission.
This declaration follows Hegseth’s earlier decision this month to prevent active-duty service members from attending Harvard beginning next year.
He accused these institutions of exploiting “a trust fund of American taxpayer dollars,” only to evolve into centers fostering anti-American sentiment and contempt for the military.
Hegseth argued that these universities have shifted focus from “the study of victory and pragmatic realism” to advancing “wokeness and weakness.”
“This is not education; this is indoctrination,” he asserted.
“The Department of War is finished subsidizing the corruption of our own in uniform class,” he said. “We’re done paying for the privilege of our enemies’ wicked ideologies to be taught to our future leaders. We’ve had enough.”
“We cannot and will not send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold.”
Hegseth added that the department would also hold itself accountable, starting with a top-to-bottom review of “our own internal war colleges, 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.”
