February 6, 2026 / 9:56 PM EST / CBS/AP
The Pentagon said Friday it is cutting ties with Harvard University, ending all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with the Ivy League institution.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Harvard “no longer meets the needs of the War Department or the military services,” adding that the department had for too long sent officers to Harvard hoping the university would “better understand and appreciate our warrior class” but that many returned “looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.” In a separate post on X, Hegseth wrote, “Harvard is woke; The War Department is not.”
Starting with the 2026-27 academic year, the Pentagon will discontinue graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs at Harvard. Personnel currently attending classes at Harvard will be able to finish those courses. Similar programs at other Ivy League universities will be evaluated in coming weeks, Hegseth said, alleging a “pervasive institutional bias” at Ivy League schools.
Harvard runs several programs for veterans and active-duty service members, including a Harvard Kennedy School fellowship, and has a long history of links to the military dating back to the Revolutionary War. Hegseth earned a master’s degree from Harvard but symbolically returned his diploma in a 2022 Fox News segment; a Pentagon social media account run by his office resurfaced the clip in which he returned the diploma and wrote “Return to Sender” on it.
The military offers officers opportunities for graduate-level education at service-run war colleges and civilian institutions like Harvard. While attendance at prestigious civilian schools is less directly tied to military career advancement than military schools, such degrees can help service members in civilian employment after leaving the military.
Hegseth also accused Harvard of having “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.” The move is the latest development in the Trump administration’s prolonged standoff with Harvard over demands for reforms. Administration officials have cut billions of dollars in Harvard’s federal research funding and attempted to block it from enrolling foreign students after the campus rebuffed government demands last April.
Harvard says the administration’s actions amount to illegal retaliation for refusing to adopt the administration’s ideological views or submit to unprecedented federal oversight of academic programs. Harvard sued the administration in two lawsuits, and a federal judge issued orders siding with Harvard in both cases; the administration is appealing.
Tensions had briefly eased last summer amid talk of a deal that never materialized. On Monday, President Trump demanded $1 billion from Harvard as part of any deal to restore federal funding, twice what he had previously sought. Several other elite schools have cut deals with the administration to restore research funding: Columbia agreed to pay $200 million, and Brown agreed to donate $50 million to workforce development programs.