Hegseth’s disdain for morality distances the Pentagon from universities

Self-styled “secretary of War” Pete Hegseth reportedly believes that moral purpose is a weakness in war, which may well explain his disdainful campaign against the foremost U.S. universities.  

In a video posted last month, Hegseth announced “the cancellation of all Department of War attendance” at Harvard, as well as “institutions like Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale and many others” for the purported offense of pushing “a creed of globalist submission,” rather than training “lethal and effective leaders.”  

A follow up memorandum named 14 U.S. universities and eight other institutions, where Senior Service College Fellowship programs for active-duty military personnel would be ended, beginning with the 2026-27 academic year. Current students would be allowed to complete their degrees. 

There are currently only 93 students in the fellowship program, 21 of whom are at Harvard, which Hegseth considers “one of the red-hot centers of hate America activism.” Still, alarms went off across higher education. Hegseth’s intention to evaluate “all existing graduate programs for active duty service members,” threatens generations of cooperation between American universities and the military. 

Terminating the Senior Service College Fellowships is only the beginning of Hegseth’s plan to replace “woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination” with “the singular mission of developing the most lethal and effective leaders and warfighters the world has ever known.”  

He has an odd way of pursuing his goal. 

The Senior Service College Fellowships are limited to senior officers who, Hegseth fears, will be hopelessly corrupted by exposure to “graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold.” But according to a “rollout plan,” obtained by Inside Higher Ed, “there is no impact to ROTC programs.”  

In other words, seasoned officers cannot be trusted to resist the lure of “wicked ideologies” at elite universities, but 19-year-old undergraduates will presumably survive just fine. 

The difference, of course, is that the military needs ROTC recruiting. Hegseth would risk an irreparable loss by tampering with ROTC, but there is no comparable cost to his puffed-up posturing about the evils of the Ivy League. 

Hegseth is obsessed with killing, constantly referring to “absolute lethality,” “most-lethal,” “lethality of the force,” “lethal warfighters,” “maximum lethality” and “lethality above all else,” to list some of his phrases. 

He seems not to have considered, or more likely refuses to recognize, that civilian education is useful to officers whose jobs include such non-lethal objectives as pacifying populations and winning the peace. As Gen. David Petraeus put it in the counterinsurgency manual, “the civilian population is the center of gravity — the deciding factor in the struggle.” 

I forwarded Hegseth’s video to two miliary veterans, asking what they thought of his “singular mission.” A former Navy Seal, awarded the Navy Cross for valor in the Vietnam era, said, “Hegseth is cutting off outside sources that provide information that is unavailable anywhere else, and invaluable to the successful prosecution of modern warfare.” A decorated Marine combat officer from the Iraq War told me that Hegseth’s video “insults the American military members and senior military leaders who actually have the capacity to think for themselves.”  

There is no contradiction between a civilian education and successful “warfighting,” as Hegseth calls it. Examples include Gen. David Petraeus (Ph.D., Princeton), Gen. H.R. McMaster (Ph.D., University of North Carolina), Gen. Wesley Clark (Rhodes Scholar, Oxford), Gen. Brent Scowcroft (Ph.D., Columbia), Gen. Colin Powell (MBA, George Washington), General John Abizaid (M.A., Harvard), Gen. Mark Milley (MBA., Columbia) and many others. 

Dwight Eisenhower was among the greatest warfighters in U.S. history. As Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, with the rank of five-star general, he led the defeat of fascism in World War II. 

Although Eisenhower’s degrees were from military institutions, he was president of Columbia University from 1948 until his inauguration in 1953. Shortly afterward, he gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College of the Ivy League, with G.I. Bill veterans among the graduates.

Here is what he said about subject matter that Hegseth would condemn today:  

“Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.” Regarding one of the “wicked” ideologies of his day, Eisenhower asked, “How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches?” 

I am embarrassed to admit having led demonstrations against Naval ROTC in the 1960s, during the anti-Vietnam War movement. The midshipmen on campus were a convenient target for protesters, but we were badly misguided. Instead of demanding their banishment, we should have appreciated their contributions in liberal arts classes.  

Hegseth now boasts that the war on Iran is being fought “without mercy,” which would violate both the first Geneva Convention and the U.S. Law of War Manual. 

There lies the true lesson in Hegseth’s intemperate vendetta: The more military instruction fixates on lethality, the greater the need for broad education in civilian institutions.  

Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. 

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