Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

https://fortune.com/2026/02/28/pentagon-officer-education-ivy-league-schools-universities-partners-ai-space/

by geox • 5 months ago

144 63 5 months ago

alephnerd5• 5 months ago

The actual announcement - https://media.defense.gov/2026/Feb/27/2003881802/-1/-1/1/ALI...

I've TFed and CAed for SSC fellows eons ago and the fact is UMich (especially the International Institute [0]), VT (CETS [1] and CGIT [2]), ASU (GSI [3] and CAPS [4]), and UNC (ASC [5], ISA [6], CES [7], and TISS [8]) remain great programs and tend to be fairly liberal.

Surprised TAMU wasn't included.

Edit: can't reply

and lo and behold

Yep, but everyone who's an SSC will self-select for Mich, UNC, ASU, and VT. SSC fellows are smart and are gunning for top exit opps in the public and private sector. Hillsdale, Regent, and Liberty don't offer that and would limit career options as they are deeply ideological programs.

[0] https://ii.umich.edu/ii/about-us/centers-programs.html

[1] https://liberalarts.vt.edu/research-centers/ceuts.html

[2] https://www.cgit.vt.edu/index.html

[3] https://nationalsecurity.asu.edu/

[4] https://www.capsresearch.org/

[5] https://africa.unc.edu/

[6] http://isa.unc.edu/

[7] https://europe.unc.edu/

[8] https://tiss-nc.org/

diek• 5 months ago

My first reaction was, "watch, they're going to replace actual rigorous educational institutions with religious colleges" and lo and behold, "Liberty University" is at the top of the list for replacement civilian institutions.

cma• 5 months ago

Religious schools have long had the strongest cancel culture out there.

MengerSponge2• 5 months ago

"One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong. Find which thing is not like the other by the time I finish this song!"

paxys• 5 months ago

Too much willingness to disobey unlawful orders from the "woke left" I assume

alephnerd5• 5 months ago

Then UMich - a notably Dem leaning govt program - wouldn't be included.

Personally, I remember taking Fairbanks Center associated classes and noticing how we have the children of Chinese VVIPs sitting next to active duty members.

It sparked interesting conversations, but seeing someone who was a test pilot at Hanford sitting next to a scion of a Red Family was interesting to say the least.

The program also absolutely did used to publicly give advice to the CCP at the time, and on the listservs I'm still on I do still see publicly pronounced UFWD members responding and posting events in the Boston area.

Ofc, if I noticed this then it was absolutely known to three-letter agencies and State, and some of the institutions included are part of a larger culture war, but there is a kernel of truth - too many children of various countries dignitaries attended the program.

Edit: can't reply

I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction

UMich isn't an isolationist program though - it's a program which imo is the closest to how foreign policy was managed under the Obama admin.

ggm• 5 months ago

Noting that we have always been at war with Eurasia, given we actually are not at war with Eurasia, would it not be both normal and sensible to at least know your Eurasian counterparts?

I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction.

ricksunny3• 5 months ago

You casually drop a lot of acronyms and references to obscure programs (here and especially in parallel comment) on the apparent assumption that everyone reading does or should be clued in to the same acronyms. I feel you do so in good faith, but I wonder where the implicit assumption comes from that the 'rest of society' ('rest' w.r..t. whatever sub-group does in fact know about these programs intimately) ought to know what this sub-group knows.

craftkiller• 5 months ago

The list of replacements institutions from the memo states at the bottom:

These institutions meet the following criteria: intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries, minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department, and Graduate-level National Security, International Affairs, and/or Public Policy Programs.

So it is definitely political and not based on merit.

peteykegsbreath• 5 months ago

Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard, FYI

stockresearcher• 5 months ago

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/26/langer-harvard-...

Esophagus42• 5 months ago

Harvard itself is an incredibly inequitable place. Student organizations — and undergraduate social life more broadly — have been criticized for being stacked heavily against those without connections. And perhaps most insidious is Harvard’s unwavering preference for so-called ALDCs – athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. Without dismantling our own elitism, how can Harvard begin to fight the product of it?

Yep. I was never more proud of my alma mater than when they announced they would no longer give preferential treatment to legacy students (students of alumni). Legacy students alone make up 1/3 of Harvard’s accepted students. (I’d say that’s an embarrassment, but for Harvard that’s a feature not a bug.)

The same way people in power will always cling to the advantages power gives them, afraid of starting from the same place as everyone else for fear they won’t make it on their merits alone.

smallerize• 5 months ago

Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. The Vice President has a degree from Yale. Trump himself graduated from Wharton, one of the Ivy League business schools (although not one directly names in the memo).

pragmatic• 5 months ago

Maybe they are right to block these institutions then?

If this is the quality of product produced what’s the point?

Our Harvard/Stanford etc management seemed less capable than products of state schools. It kind of shocked me as I thought once I got into startups and scaleups with Ivy League talent I’d be way over my head. Very much a let down.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 months ago

They network their way to the top. Everybody else has to develop real skills.

oefrha• 5 months ago

I feel attacked as a Stanford/Princeton graduate. Yes, there are pieces of shit among the graduates, especially among the legacy admissions, but you can’t write off all of us by association.

thatfrenchguy2• 5 months ago

Half of the best engineers I know come from a random state school, from a random country, and we should work way harder than we do on finding those people.

But also… the other half come from prestigious colleges, and the way you solve the first half is not by not hiring the second half.

SideQuark3• 5 months ago

Hiring costs time, money, and other engineers time and effort. Wasting money and time reviewing a pool with less good candidates will simply lose you business over time, as you waste more resources to obtain the same result.

pyuser5837• 5 months ago

Are American universities really turning out engineers with high GPAs and relevant coursework that are unqualified? Or even create a disadvantage for their employer?

I mean realistically you don’t know how good an engineer is until they get on projects and you see their work. But that’s true for Harvard too,

thatfrenchguy2• 5 months ago

And your line is thinking is how we end up with what is going on at the Pentagon, and less innovation in our industry :)

beAbU• 5 months ago

So you are saying the Ivy League pool is the one with more better candidates?

The same pool where connections, rather than merit count? Where the candidates have (probably) been coddled by their loaded parents all their lives? Where they fake disabilities in order to get affordances such as better housing, "support" animals and so on?

RobRivera• 5 months ago

Great! Let's just continue perpetuating institutionalized bias rooted in a non-metric driven hypothesis on candidate potential!

watwut2• 5 months ago

The decision has nothing to do with any of that tho. Te goal is to punish suspect liberals.

And to give advantage to candidate from right wing and conservative institutions. Because that is the oficial state ideology now.

euio757• 5 months ago

Interestingly, Dartmouth, UPenn, and Cornell aren't on the Cancelled Senior Service College (SSC) Fellowships list. So this is some select Ivy Leagues only.

MengerSponge2• 5 months ago

Maybe they like Cornell's existing military affiliation?

Meredith: You know, I once dated a couple of guys from Cornell. They were really nice, gave me a ride home.

Andy: I seriously doubt anyone from Cornell dated you.

Creed: It's pronounced "colonel." It's the highest rank in the military.

Andy: It's pronounced Cornell! It's the highest rank in the Ivy league.

pyuser5837• 5 months ago

Cornell guys are assholes. I know this from experience. I hope it’s changed, but doubt it has.

altairprime• 5 months ago

Each of those three bowed their head to D&I demands, paid the bribe-fine demanded by the U.S. president, and revised their diversity definitions as demanded. So of course they’re exempt; that’s why they chose to pay their protection fee, after all. For example:

https://info.cornell.edu/executive-orders/federal-agreement/

The university was reluctant to pay $30 million to the federal government to settle the OCR complaints; however, the alternative course of action would involve years of legal actions against the government with an uncertain outcome and untold costs to careers and livelihoods.

Short_tend• 5 months ago

As someone enrolled in an IVY and seeing the absurd speculation by random commenter's, this is ridiculous. I can only speak for Columbia, but the amount of work & study we do all for this country is immense. EVEN if you are partisan you should know there are RW or neoliberal elements active here. Our country and the many young people who want to be in public service will suffer from this.

And no, we are not whatever random ragebait curated LW “WOKE” that’s protrayed online.

rcbdev• 5 months ago

You "work & study" all for your country? That is impressive. Where I'm from, most people educate themselves for their own benefit and not because of some greater nationalistic plan. But we also don't pledge allegiances every single day for 11+ years of schooling, maybe that helps.

AreShoesFeet000• 5 months ago

This is a plain admission that the administration has lost on the merits of their arguments.

tty456• 5 months ago

Yeah, thats smart. /s

floatrock• 5 months ago

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?

Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.

Foot, meet gun.

conception• 5 months ago

Fascism always trends to incompetency because loyalty is more important than skill and knowledge.

Aeolun• 5 months ago

So it’s just a matter of time before the US crashes?

fifilura• 5 months ago

It is simpler than that.

Fascism always trends to incompetency because it is stupid.

pyuser5837• 5 months ago

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.

Or from … history.

The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.

The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

maplethorpe2• 5 months ago

I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.

olelele• 5 months ago

The nazi regime destroyed a lot of what today would be classified as "woke research" by the reactionary right. Sexuality studies, social studies and so on. The book burnings were not only about rooting out fiction, they destroyed research.

spwa4• 5 months ago

History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.

Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.

xhkkffbf• 5 months ago

It's more complicated. At many of these top universities, woke means don't hire whites. And Jews are often lumped in with whites. The Jewish percentage at top schools has dropped dramatically as wokeism appeared. At Princeton, one top professor campaigns to "eliminate whiteness" and he's very open about it.

hulitu• 5 months ago

So it is not a purge, it is "blocking". One has got to love American propaganda.

quickthrowman• 5 months ago

What’s next, a requirement for officers to be active alcoholics so their decision making skills are as compromised as the Secretary of Defense? It’s embarrassing to have a drunk as a cabinet level officer.

ekjhgkejhgk• 5 months ago

Wait, I thought Republicans were against cancel culture?

JohnTHaller• 5 months ago

They're against anyone cancelling their "culture"

Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

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