Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ordered the “complete and immediate cancellation” of all Department of War attendants at universities “like Princeton, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown and Yale, and many others.”
The announcement, made in a video on X, would apply to the 2026-2027 academic year.
The Secretary of War said that these universities, instead of enhancing the abilities of members of the military, are delivering anti-American “indoctrination.”
Hegseth’s action comes after he similarly banned active-duty service members earlier this month from attending Harvard starting next year.
Hegseth said the higher education industry has been “poisoned from within from a class of so-called elite universities who’ve abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”
He accused the universities of accessing for decades a “trust fund of American taxpayer dollars only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
Universities, he said, have substituted “the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness.”
“This is not education, this is indoctrination,” he said.
Hegseth continued:
The Department of War is finished subsidizing the corruption of our own in uniform class. 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.
The secretary also said that the Pentagon would also “hold itself accountable.”
That meant a full review of its own war colleges, he said, presumably institutions that include West Point and U.S. Naval Academy.
The review would ensure “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,” Hegseth said.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
