DOD Ends Partnership Between Brown, Naval War College

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ended a more than decade-long partnership between Brown University and the Naval War College, asserting this week that Brown was the only institution more ideologically biased than its Ivy League peers Harvard and Columbia.  

The partnership, which was established in 2014 and terminated in October, allowed the two Rhode Island institutions to work together and address national security concerns through research, teaching and fellowships. But in his speech, Hegseth warned that these kinds of partnerships have led American military colleges to become “dangerously civilianized” and damaged by “critical theory and the corrosive apparatus of diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

“Over the past two decades our service colleges increasingly imported the worst pathologies of contemporary civilian higher education, rather than maintaining the austere focus on the profession of arms,” the secretary said Monday during a speech at the Naval College. “Our institutions succumbed to the prevailing intellectual fashions of the civilian academy, a system that has largely abandoned teaching students how to think in favor of indoctrinating them into what to think.”

After announcing the termination, the Department of Defense released a memo that included 33 “reform tasks” military education institutions should prioritize to “forge warfighters” and redirect their focus from “theory and indulged ideological distractions” to “practical warfighting.” In recent months, Hegseth has sought to sever or redefine the military’s ties with certain higher education institutions, axing fellowships and threatening to end graduate tuition assistance at dozens of universities, including Brown.

Brian Clark, Brown’s vice president for news and strategic campus communications, told Inside Higher Ed that while it’s “unclear” the extent to which Brown will be able to continue working with the Naval War College, the university’s hope is “that these important collaborations can be maintained.”

“Time and again, Brown has demonstrated its commitment to proudly supporting the education, research and service mission of the U.S. Armed Forces,” Clark wrote. “Brown remains committed to supporting research and scholarship on issues important to the U.S. Armed Forces, and to ensuring that student veterans and ROTC participants continue to contribute their valuable perspectives and experiences to research and teaching at Brown.”