Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Friday that the Department of Defense would end attendance for active-duty military personnel at 13 universities, including Tufts, due to what he called “wokeness” and “indoctrination.”
The policy — which was outlined in a memo titled “Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values” — will affect Senior Service College fellowships funded by the federal government, which allow graduate-level senior military personnel to study at civilian universities and other institutions for year-long assignments. Undergraduate programs, including the Reserve Officer Training Corps, G.I. Bill and post-9/11 benefits do not appear to be affected.
The memo states that six fellowships at Tufts will be cancelled next academic year, though current military personnel are expected to be able to complete their programs. A Tufts spokesperson said the university was reviewing the order and declined to comment.
Other institutions affected include five Ivy League universities — Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale — as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University and others. The severing of ties with Harvard was announced earlier in February, with Hegseth saying that the university was “no longer a welcoming institution to military personnel or the right place to develop them.”
Fellowships at seven think tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, are also being cancelled.
The Department of Defense, which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War, released a new list of potential partner institutions, including Liberty University, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee, as well as senior military colleges like The Citadel and other government programs.
In a video posted on X on Friday, Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, said elite institutions had “abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”
“They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness,” he said. “They’ve traded true intellectual rigor for radical dogma, sacrificing free expression for the suffocating confines of leftist ideology.”
The Fletcher School has maintained a significant relationship with the U.S. military through the attendance of field-grade officers at the school’s International Security Studies Program.
“This sustained participation reflects the important contribution that ISSP continues to make to the education of our future military leaders, as well as our high visibility and prestige within the Armed Services,” the program’s website says.
SSC fellows are separate from the military and U.S. Coast Guard students who come to Fletcher as degree candidates.
In his video, Hegseth suggested that military personnel were being taught to “despise the very nation they swore to defend” and described the curricula at the cancelled universities as “a calculated, targeted assault on the core of our fighting force” and a “corruption of our own uniformed class.”
The Department of Defense referred the Daily to a press release from Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell. It was unclear by press time whether ISSP fellows had responded to a request for comment.
