Hegseth orders ban on military attendance at Ivy schools like Columbia, Yale

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Friday that he is ordering the “complete and immediate termination” of all War Department officials at universities including Princeton, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown and Yale, beginning in the 2026-27 academic year.

Hegseth added that the ban would also affect “many others”, saying the higher education system has been “poisoned from within by a class of so-called elite universities who have abused their privileges and their access to this department and have completely betrayed their purpose”.

Hegseth’s announcement comes after he also banned active-duty military members earlier this month from attending Harvard starting next year.

He accused universities of glutting themselves for decades on a “trust fund of American taxpayer dollars to become factories of anti-American resentment and military contempt.”

War Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday he was ordering the “complete and immediate termination” of all War Department officials at universities including Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown and Yale, effective the next academic year. (Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post; Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

He claimed that universities had replaced “the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of enlightenment and weakness.”

“It’s not education, it’s indoctrination,” he added.

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“The War Department is done subsidizing the corruption of our own uniform classes,” he said. “We are done paying for the evil ideologies of our enemies to be taught to our future leaders. We have had enough.

The campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“We cannot and will not send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values ​​they are sworn to uphold.”

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Hegseth added that the department would also hold itself accountable, starting with a top-to-bottom review of “our own internal war schools, ensuring that they are once again bastions of strategic thinking, fully dedicated to the singular mission of training the deadliest and most effective leaders and war fighters the world has ever known.”

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