United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that, beginning with the 2026–27 academic year, military members will not be allowed to attend various institutions, including some in the Ivy League.
Hegseth, who obtained his bachelor’s degree at Princeton and his master’s at Harvard, has been among the more prominent members of the Donald Trump administration critical of the current education system. Schools at both the K–12 and university levels have come under immense backlash in recent years, even more so amid the recent rash of anti-government and anti-ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) protests.
“We demand that senior service colleges work to sharpen our war fighters on genuine national security issues, not social justice activism,” Hegseth said in a video on his X account. “We demand [curricula] grounded in the founding principles of this republic, principles that champion the enduring ideals of peace through strength and putting American interests first.”
Hegseth added, “We demand universities that invest back into our nation’s prosperity rather than our greatest adversaries. It’s common sense. No longer will we sit back and treat these woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination as valid centers of so-called intellectual curiosity.”
For too long, the Ivy League and similar institutions have been subjecting our warriors to woke indoctrination—those days are over. pic.twitter.com/0xMC6BArDd
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) February 27, 2026
Hegseth announced that the following universities are among those affected by the forthcoming changes.
- Columbia University
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Princeton University
- Brown University
- Yale University
Hegseth previously announced the Pentagon would cut all academic ties with Harvard starting next academic year. Most U.S. universities typically begin their academic year in August or September.
“For decades, the Ivy League and similar institutions have gorged themselves on a trust fund of American taxpayer dollars,” Hegseth said, “only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
Hegseth says he has ordered the “complete and immediate cancellation” of DOD attendance at Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale, and “many others.”@NatashaBertrand and I reported on this earlier this month. One military official told us the move amounted to an attempt “to… https://t.co/ad1v09PBJ8
— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) February 27, 2026
The announcement came just one day before Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student group at the Ivy League school, wrote “Marg bar Amrika” in an X post following the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran. That translates to, “Death to America,” and CUAD later said that it deleted the post so X would unlock its account. CUAD also made it clear on X that the group is not a registered student organization at the “fascist state functionary known as Columbia University.”
There have been various controversies in education over the past few months, and some teachers have even lost their jobs over social media posts or inappropriate comments in class. A psychology instructor at Coastal Carolina Community College was fired in February after mocking the late Charlie Kirk and calling Trump a “dictator” in leaked audio.
Hegseth added that the government will “hold ourselves accountable” by conducting a full review of U.S. war colleges. Although Hegseth did not specify any of those universities, some of the schools considered war colleges include service academies, senior military colleges, and state-supported maritime colleges.
