Hegseth’s Turn on Elite Universities Has Confused Service Members

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to cancel fellowships for senior military officers to attend select American universities has caused confusion among members of the armed services and has raised concerns that the military will no longer have access to the country’s most elite institutions.

These fellowships were often a point of pride in the military — and used as a stepping stool for promotions. Without them, service members say they are left wondering whether attending the very schools that educated officials like Hegseth himself will now be seen as a disadvantage.

“My whole career, it’s been seen as a mark of pride to be able to go to a prestigious school and attend one of these,” an active duty military officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity told NOTUS. “I think the bigger fear is that it could grow in the next couple of years to include more programs that people are sort of counting on attending or planning their whole family life around.”

In late February, Hegseth canceled fellowship programs with five Ivy League schools: Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University. He also ended programs with other major institutions like Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown University, George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hegseth said the programs — which allowed service members to conduct research and take graduate-level classes — amounted to “woke indoctrination.” He himself attended Harvard and Princeton.

In a memo announcing the end of the programs, the Defense Department suggested “potential new partner institutions” with more conservative-leaning schools like Hillsdale College, Liberty University, the University of Florida and Baylor University.

Currently, 93 senior service members at 22 institutions are impacted by this policy change, a small number compared to the entirety of the military’s Professional Military Education institutions. But experts and the people who rely on these programs are growing concerned that the department will continue to make cuts based on politics.

“We have a lot of concern that the department is effectively limiting choices available to senior military officers and potentially other civilian leaders at the Pentagon,” said Lindsey Tepe, the director of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents more than a thousand colleges and universities. “I think our members are increasingly worried about how politicizing military education and the training of our officers is going to have negative downstream effects.”

Ending the fellowships will create a gap between the military and institutions conducting research on the topics the military says it is prioritizing, like artificial intelligence and new technologies, experts and researchers said.

Hegseth also canceled fellowships with some think tanks and nonprofits including The Brookings Institution, the New America Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The Department of Defense is cutting itself off from a major engine of research in the United States, just as it’s seeking to transform the industrial base, and as it’s leaning into artificial intelligence, and it’s leaning into new technologies where universities are, you know, along with folks in Silicon Valley, are leading,” Carrie Lee, a former senior service education professor, told NOTUS.

Another veteran, Maggie Seymour, who served in the Marine Corps, said the change will “exacerbate” divides between “academia, thinker strategy, and the people who actually execute foreign policy.”

Those currently enrolled in one of the now-canceled fellowships can finish out the year, according to the Defense Department’s memo. Those who have already been accepted into the 2026-2027 class of fellows will find their options limited.

“We will no longer invest in institutions that fail to sharpen our leaders’ warfighting capabilities or that undermine the very values they are sworn to defend,” the memo reads.

Many elite institutions have had longstanding partnerships with some, if not all, of the branches of the military, and have educated many policymakers and senior administration officials alike.

“Officers in these fellowships are the future leaders of our military. These fellowships benefit both the students that attend and the military, that is why they have been so successful in the past. Cutting them will only worsen our readiness,” Rep. Gil Cisneros, a former Navy officer who attended both Brown University and George Washington University, told NOTUS in a statement.