Dem
47
GOP
53
Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth loves cosplaying as Tough Guy. His latest target is woke elite
universities. After all, the culture war is a war where he can lead the troops. He is
threatening
to pull tuition assistance from service members at universities he views as biased against the armed forces.
This move is setting off alarm bells in military and academic circles. People are worried about cutting off a key pipeline of future officers. After all, Hegseth's view of a true warrior is a grunt in a trench shooting at enemy grunts in a trench 100 yards away. The concept that a second lieutenant who has a master's in computer science and is writing the code to have a drone autonomously do reconnaissance on some far-away target could be a very useful soldier is foreign to the Secretary.
Harvard is a primary target. Hegseth has said, without any evidence, "too many faculty members openly loathe our military," adding, "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. 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."
Hegseth has instructed the military branches to evaluate all graduate programs at top-tier institutions to see if they should be put on his black list. The Army has already drawn up a list of 34 schools that have a moderate-to-high risk of being banned. These include the University of Pennsylvania (where Donald Trump graduated), Yale (where J.D. Vance studied law) and Princeton (Hegseth's own alma mater).
At most of these schools, there isn't really much opposition to soldiers as such. The opposition is to civilian leaders—such as Hegseth—who order attacks on countries whose leaders they don't like or just because they think they can get away with it. Having America's soldiers get second-rate educations, boy that will teach China a lesson. Chinese President Xi Jinping is probably asking his foreign minister: "Could you please explain to me why the Americans are intentionally weakening their own military? Is Hegseth one of our assets? I don't understand."
The Hill is a center-right publication, at least on opinion content, and presumably its readers lean at least somewhat to the right. There was a reader survey about the article cited above and 89% of the readers strongly oppose Hegseth's brainchild, with only 6% strongly supporting it. He definitely thinks outside the box. (V)