One thing is clear: Trump as Harvard material was always a stretch.
Harvard University has long been a favourite punching bag for the culture-warriors now dominating the Trump White House, with the president himself leading the charge.
According to presidential biographer Michael Wolff, whom Trump dismisses as a “third-rate reporter,” the animus may even be personal. Wolff suggests Trump’s hostility stems from being rejected when he applied to Harvard, and that this is simply payback.
Whether or not that particular grievance is true, one thing is clear: Trump as Harvard material was always a stretch. Yet the vitriol directed at the world’s most famous university now appears to have real consequences.
This week, the US Department of Defense announced it will sever its academic ties with Harvard, ending graduate-level military training, fellowships and certificate programmes at the Ivy League institution. Military personnel already enrolled will be allowed to complete their studies, but from autumn onward the relationship will be over.
The decision was announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who accused Harvard, the oldest university in the United States, of being a hub of “hate-America activism.” In a video posted on X, Hegseth declared that Harvard has become a “factory for woke ideology and a breeding ground for anti-American radicals,” allegedly incompatible with the Pentagon’s focus on “lethality” and “deterrence.”
This is an extraordinary claim to make about an institution that has educated generations of US military leaders and public servants, and whose relationship with the armed forces dates back to George Washington. Harvard consistently tops the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, operates the world’s largest academic library system, and remains a global leader in research, innovation and policy thinking.
Hegseth’s grievance appears not to be that Harvard fails to serve the national interest, but that it encourages critical thinking.
“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,” he said. “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.”
The move fits into a broader campaign by Trump and his allies to punish institutions that refuse to bend to their ideological agenda. It follows Trump’s recent announcement that he was seeking $1bn (£730m) in damages from Harvard after the New York Times reported his administration had to backtrack from its demand for a $200m payment in negotiations with the university. Trump accuses the university of “feeding a lot of nonsense” to the news outlet.
This comes on top of repeated attempts by the administration to freeze federal funding to Harvard, threaten its tax-exempt status, and challenge its ability to enrol international students.
There is also a striking whiff of hypocrisy in the story. Hegseth himself is a Harvard alumnus, having earned a Master of Public Policy from the university’s Kennedy School in 2013, a programme widely attended by federal employees, including military officers. In 2022, he theatrically returned his diploma in protest at Harvard’s teaching of critical race theory, apparently concluding that the education which once advanced his career had become intolerable once it challenged his worldview.
What this episode seems to ultimately reveal, is not a problem with Harvard, but with the intellectual insecurity of those now running US defence policy. Universities that encourage debate, evidence-based reasoning and exposure to global realities are being recast as enemies, while slogans about “wokeness” substitute for serious strategic thinking. No wonder Donald Trump was rejected, at least according to the rumours.
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