Pentagon Will Cut Ties With Several Elite Universities, Hegseth Says

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced today that the Pentagon will discontinue academic programs with Princeton University, Yale, Brown, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many others ahead of the 2026–2027 academic year.

“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,” Hegseth said in a four-minute video posted on X.

“There should exist a sacred trust between America’s institutions and our warriors. Unfortunately, this sacred trust has been broken in this military’s professional military education system. It’s been poisoned from within by a class of so-called elite universities that have abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”

This follows the Feb. 6 announcement in which Hegseth said ties will be cut with Harvard University. The move affects a variety of senior service institution programs, including graduate-level courses, fellowships, and certificate programs. Military personnel already enrolled in these programs will be allowed to finish their courses, the Pentagon chief said previously.

Hegseth also said the federal government’s own service institutions—including West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the Coast Guard Academy—will also be reviewed “top to bottom” for “indoctrination.”

“We’re going to hold ourselves accountable as well,” he said.

Hegseth is an alumnus of two Ivy League schools he’s sanctioning. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Princeton and a master’s at Harvard. Hegseth has been a vocal critic of Harvard and previously stated that he sent his degree back to the school in protest of its leftist ideology.

“The Department of War is finished subsidizing the corruption of our own uniform class,” he said on Feb. 27. “We’re done paying for the privilege of our enemies’ wicked ideologies to be taught to our future leaders. We’ve had enough. We demand that senior services colleges work to sharpen our war fighters on genuine national security issues, not social justice activism.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for comment but received no response.

Viewpoint diversity in higher education has been a contentious issue so far during President Donald Trump’s second term. He has publicly criticized colleges for promoting progressive ideology and has offered incentives for institutional neutrality, meaning the administration at schools doesn’t publicize a position on political or social issues.

A report released by Heterodox Academy this week that examined political diversity at universities cited polls in which 29 percent of Harvard faculty members identified as very liberal, 34 percent as somewhat liberal, and 9 percent as somewhat conservative. A poll of Yale cited in that report identified 66 percent of faculty members as Democrats and 1.8 percent as Republicans.

“The assertion that the academy leans left is overall supported by the data,” the report said. “Nearly all studies in our review reveal a pronounced leftward lean among faculty, regardless of the faculty population, institutional focus, metric of political leaning, or data source.”