Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not mince his intentions when he cut the Pentagon’s longstanding ties to Ivy League universities. In a February 2026 memorandum, he canceled 93 Senior Service College Fellowship positions at 22 institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Columbia, and Georgetown. The message was unmistakable: the military exists to defend the republic, not to subsidize campuses that have traded scholarship for activism.
Weeks later, Hillsdale College answered the call. On March 30, President Larry Arnn wrote directly to Hegseth, thanking the Department of War for qualifying the school to educate senior officers preparing for top command. Arnn made no secret of the college’s appeal. Hillsdale refuses every dollar of federal funding to preserve its independence, and its curriculum centers on the U.S. Constitution and the political philosophy of the West. In an era when many universities treat those foundations as relics to be deconstructed, Hillsdale still treats them as living truths worth defending.