Pete Hegseth recently announced that beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the Pentagon is cutting ties with the Ivy League institution, ending all military training, fellowships, and certificate programs for active-duty service members.
"For too long, this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class," the War Secretary said last Friday. "Instead, too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks."
"Harvard is woke; the War Department is not," he summarized.
Brian Camenker, president of MassResistance, agrees that "Harvard has just become vile."
"I wouldn't have anything to do with them or most of those Ivy League schools," he tells AFN. "They're horrible."
Hegseth recognizes that the U.S. military once had an important and often positive relationship with Harvard, but the university’s new relationships with foreign powers—including the Chinese Communist Party—and its on-campus discriminatory culture have made it unwelcoming to U.S. military personnel and unsuitable for developing future leaders.
A 2025 task force report confirmed that Jewish students faced bias, intimidation, alienation, and exclusion, with 26% reporting they felt physically unsafe and nearly 60% experiencing discrimination based on their views.
President Donald Trump earlier this month accused Harvard of being “strongly antisemitic” and demanded $1 billion in damages.
Going forward, Hegseth said the War Department will focus on developing warriors, increasing lethality, and reestablishing deterrence.
"That no longer includes spending billions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country," he said.
Camenker is amused by the far-left media's claims that Harvard is being harassed and discriminated against. The Boston Globe, for example, says Trump's administration and MAGA have declared "war on Harvard."
"But normal people get it," Camenker asserts.
At Harvard, military personnel who are currently attending classes will be able to finish those courses of study, but similar programs at other Ivy League universities – that Hegseth says have shown a "pervasive institutional bias" – will be evaluated in the coming weeks.
