When Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in February that the Defense Department would sever ties with Harvard University, he framed the move as an act of ideological hygiene. Harvard, he suggested, is an incubator of “woke” narratives awash in liberal orthodoxy with faculty that “squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings.” Later, the Secretary formally added 13 more institutions to the department’s list of “canceled” educational relationships, accusing each of “sacrificing freedom of expression for the suffocating confines of leftist ideology.” The ironies and contradictions in the Secretary’s logic to purge the military of elite education, respectfully, demand serious discussion.
The Defense Department, Mr. Hegseth proclaims in his video canceling Harvard, needs “leaders who can wrestle with multiple viewpoints,” not useless “ideological automatons.” But cutting ties to these universities is less likely to produce independent thinking, and ironically, more likely to produce the very ideological automatons the Secretary decries.
The inferences are direct. Secretary Hegseth apparently believes his officers are not just impressionable, but ideologically brittle. He implies that years of operational experience, command responsibility, and professional military education can be undone by seminar discussions and exposure to alternative policy perspectives. He subtly suggests that the same men and women entrusted with lethal authority and national secrets cannot be trusted with a syllabus.
That is not a serious critique of an academic institution. It is a tacit indictment of the military officer corps by the Secretary of Defense.
As a former commissioned officer himself, Mr. Hegseth knows that military officers are not plucked from obscurity and handed commissions as a social experiment. They are trained, screened, evaluated, promoted, and tested repeatedly. The system prizes resilience, independent judgment, intellectual rigor, and moral steadiness under pressure. Those selected for competitive graduate programs – whether at Harvard or elsewhere – are typically among the most capable in their cohorts.
And yet Secretary Hegseth proclaims that graduate school might unravel all of that.
Despite the Secretary’s unfounded logic, elite education doesn’t weaken a military officer’s character; it strengthens it.
I speak from experience. I am a veteran military officer and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I am also a registered Republican and a gun owner. I did not arrive in Cambridge confused about my political identity. I did not leave with it erased or chastened.
At no point during my time at Harvard did I feel ostracized or vilified for holding views different from many of my peers. I encountered disagreement. Robust disagreement. It is, after all, a school of government. The Kennedy School classrooms are not therapy circles designed for social and emotional validation. They are debate forums and intellectual proving grounds where you check your ego at the door. Faculty span the political spectrum, many having served in presidential administrations of both parties. Discussions are sharp, substantive, and often uncomfortable. That is precisely why the experience is valuable.
It’s no wonder that scores of senior military leaders, conservative members of Congress, and current administration officials attended Harvard and the other educational institutions on the list of 13.
My year at Harvard was the most professionally developing and intellectually maturing year of my career. It sharpened my arguments. It expanded and clarified my perspectives. It forced me to defend my positions under scrutiny rather than merely assert them to an audience of like-minded simpletons snapping their fingers in solidarity. Exposure to competing worldviews did not weaken conviction; it refined it.
This is the basis of the irony and contradiction in the Secretary’s message.
Mr. Hegseth is both a veteran military officer and a Harvard Kennedy School graduate. He sat in those classrooms. He absorbed those lectures. He engaged in those discussions. He was exposed to the very “wokeness” he now warns will contaminate military officers. And yet he emerged the same as he entered: a staunch conservative.
Secretary Hegseth himself is a glaring artifact loudly contradicting his own logic.
If Harvard is such an ideological toxin, why did it fail to infect him? If its narratives are so corrosive, how did he graduate and remain ideologically intact? Mr. Hegseth’s own trajectory demonstrates that confident and intelligent officers do not dissolve upon contact with competing ideas. They test those ideas. They reject some. They embrace others. They leave stronger for having engaged them.
That is what serious education does.
In case you might think Mr. Hegseth distinguishes the time he went to Harvard from now, he doesn’t. In 2022, Hegseth said, “I may have survived it, and thank goodness, but a lot of kids go there and buy into ‘critical theory university.’”
The irony here is noteworthy. Yet that is not the only flaw in Mr. Hegseth’s intellectual purge. His continued injection of political partisanship into the Department of Defense is equally as concerning as his distancing from elite education.
If Harvard and other elite universities lean left – as the Secretary argues – so what? The United States military is a non-partisan institution. The Department of Defense and its employees, both uniformed and civilian, do not advocate for or decry a partisan political position; it remains decisively neutral. If the Department genuinely embraces this nonpartisan identity, a school’s perceived political leanings should matter not in determining whether to sponsor military officers to attend. But according to Mr. Hegseth, a supposed left-leaning university is counter to military values and ethos.
The obvious counterfactual to this suggests military virtues and warrior ethos are synonymous only with conservative, right-leaning views. In espousing this perspective, Mr. Hegseth challenges the very fabric of the military – its political neutrality – that makes it traditionally among the most trusted institutions in our republic.
Rather than sever ties with elite universities, the Defense Department should continue sending intellectually confident officers to these schools and let them represent the profession of arms with military professionalism. Let them challenge assumptions about the military while absorbing insights about policy, economics, and governance, regardless of political alignment. That exchange strengthens civil-military understanding. It strengthens strategy. It strengthens the force.
Secretary Hegseth’s decision reflects a defensive crouch masquerading as ideological courage. It assumes contamination risk. It presumes fragility. It implies that military officers cannot withstand exposure to disagreement without ideological drift. And more notably, it suggests that all military officers are – or should be – right-leaning conservatives. I am here to tell you, Mr. Secretary, respectfully, they are not.
The American military has never been strengthened by intellectual insulation. It has been strengthened by rigorous debate, by friction with civilian institutions, and by officers who can operate fluently in both uniformed and policy worlds. The complexity of modern warfare demands strategic thinkers who understand not only tactics but interagency dynamics, political constraints, and global narratives. Institutions like Harvard’s Kennedy School provide precisely that ecosystem.
By severing ties, Mr. Hegseth is not punishing the elite schools. Harvard and others on the list –which includes MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgetown – will continue to operate at the center of global policy discourse with or without U.S. military officers. The real cost will be borne by future officers, who will lose access to some of the most dynamic policy environments in the world. The force will be diminished for it.
Of equal concern is the status of those officers with education from these now “canceled” universities. Given Secretary Hegseth’s observation, for example, that officers come back “looking too much like Harvard,” it further implies that officers with Harvard degrees may soon find themselves in the crosshairs of the Secretary’s war on intellectualism, facing strict loyalty, purity, and conformity tests or risk becoming sacrificial offerings in the course of the intellectual purge.
That is the perceived subtext of the Secretary’s message among the Defense Department.
I previously served for nearly two decades in roles supporting the Department of Defense, both in and out of uniform. After my Marine Corps career ended early due to injury, I transitioned into civilian work, where I embedded, trained, and operated with conventional and special operations units in combat and conflict zones in the Middle East, the Sahel, and Eastern Europe. I have worked with military officers in every branch and “every clime and place,” from the scorching heat of Baghdad to the chilling cold of the Arctic. These men and women are not ideological clay. They are professionals who have navigated adversaries attempting to manipulate and deceive them. They have withstood propaganda campaigns and battlefield uncertainty. They can withstand a policy seminar in Cambridge.
If we believe in the caliber of our officer corps, we should have the confidence to let them prove it. Secretary Hegseth proved it can be done. And now he argues others cannot do the same.
The contradiction is not subtle. It is glaring. And it suggests a deeper truth: this decision does not appear to be about protecting officers from purported leftist schools. It appears to be about shielding officers from ideas the Secretary of Defense perceives as antithetical to his conception of military virtue.
The unfortunate irony here is that Mr. Hegseth wants his officers to do as he says; not as he did. So much for Ductus Exemplo.
