The Pentagon will forbid members of the military from attending Columbia, Yale, Brown and other universities starting next school year amid a campaign to cut ties with institutions that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called “factories of anti-American resentment.”
Hegseth announced the policy in a video posted to social media on Friday, three weeks after he said the military was cutting ties with Harvard University. Without citing evidence, Hegseth said the universities have become “breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” that undermine military values.
“For decades, the Ivy League and similar institutions have gorged themselves on a trust fund of American taxpayer dollars, only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain,” he said. “They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness.”
Hegseth said the ban applies to Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and “many others” without elaborating. He called for “complete and immediate cancellation of all Department of War attendance,” though it was not clear how broadly it would be applied.
A message seeking further details was not immediately answered by the Pentagon.
As of Friday, Columbia, Brown, MIT and Harvard were still listed as eligible institutions in a Pentagon database for its Tuition Assistance program, which covers the full cost of tuition for active-duty personnel. Harvard had 39 participants in 2023, according to the most recent data, while Columbia had nine and MIT had two.
The earlier action against Harvard aims to block members of the military from attending graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs, according to a statement released at the time. There are still questions about whether it applies to programs such as Harvard’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program.
Harvard has offered a series of professional development programs and a small number of degree programs tailored to the Pentagon. Last year, it created a new master’s degree in public administration for active-duty military members and veterans. Hegseth earned a master’s degree from Harvard but symbolically returned his diploma in a 2022 Fox News segment.
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.
Campuses across the Ivy League have been a favorite target of President Donald Trump, who accuses them of becoming overrun by “woke” ideology. His administration has cut billions of dollars in research funding and attempted a number of other sanctions against the universities, often as part of investigations into allegations that officials tolerated antisemitism on campus.
Hegseth’s announcement is a rebuke to universities that had appeared to have reached a truce with the administration in recent months. Columbia and Brown were among the earliest universities to sign deals with the White House, agreeing to a range of demands in order to have their federal funding restored.
Harvard is fighting back against such demands, alleging in lawsuits that the government is illegally retaliating against the university for rebuffing its ideological views. Last summer, Trump said he was days away from reaching a deal with Harvard, but negotiations appear to have fallen apart. Earlier this month, Trump said Harvard must pay $1 billion to the government as part of any deal, twice what he had previously demanded.
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