Pentagon Cancels Fellowships at 13 “Elite” U.S. Colleges

On Friday, the Department of Defense cut ties for professional military education at 13 higher education institutions and nine other organizations, including Brown University, Columbia University and Princeton University. The announcement follows the Pentagon’s decision to sever academic ties with Harvard last month. 

Queen’s University in Canada, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are among the other nonprofit institutions where fellowships have been canceled. 

In a memo to senior Pentagon leadership, the agency said it would eliminate the senior service college fellows programs at those institutions for the 2026–27 academic year. According to the document, the move impacts 93 fellowships, including 21 at Harvard, 11 at the West Space Scholars Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and eight at Saint Louis University. 

In a video posted to social media, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “For decades the Ivy League and similar institutions have gorged themselves on a trust fund of American taxpayer dollars only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”

Without offering any evidence, he said the institutions are “woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” and the department would no longer treat them “as valid centers of so-called intellectual curiosity.”

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

The department has identified 21 new partner institutions that could replace the fellowships, including Liberty University, Hillsdale College, George Mason University and the University of Michigan. 

In addition to offering the appropriate graduate-level programming, the memo said these institutions also meet the department’s criteria for “intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries” and “minimal public expressions in opposition to the Department.”

The memo did not say how the department measured institutions’ performance in these areas.