In Newport, Pete Hegseth said he cut ties with Brown University. It ‘caught everyone off guard.’

Detailed summary

The US defense secretary said Monday he ended a relationship last month between the Ivy League school and Newport’s US Naval War College. Records show the initiative was actually terminated a day after his speech.

PROVIDENCE – In Newport on Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Naval War College faculty and students he had ended their longstanding partnership with Brown University, warning that the military’s education system has become “dangerously civilianized.”

Hegseth said he terminated a memorandum of understanding between the two institutions last month.

But his remarks “caught everyone off guard,” according to Dr. Adam C. Levine, who has facilitated the partnership for 10 years on Brown’s behalf.

“It caught Brown University off guard. It caught everyone at the Naval War College off guard,” Levine, a professor of emergency medicine and international and public affairs at Brown, said in an interview. “None of them had any idea he was going to say that.”

An email and other documents obtained by the Globe show the Naval War College discontinued the initiative centered on improving distribution of humanitarian aid on Tuesday, the day after Hegseth’s speech.

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has taken dramatic actions to alter the military’s relationship with higher education, as he has decried some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities for promoting what he has called “wokeness and weakness.”

A policy that took hold this school year barred members of the military from attending fellowships at Brown, as well as Columbia and Harvard universities, among other elite institutions that Hegseth, himself a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard, said have become “factories of anti-American resentment.”

In his Newport address, Hegseth announced 33 directives centered on overhauling the nation’s war colleges – instructions, he said, that would stamp out “destructive ideologies” and “the worst pathologies of contemporary civilian higher education” while promoting a “resolute warrior ethos.”'

Speaking of the Naval War College’s work with Brown, Hegseth said, “The only place more stridently ideological in one direction, more than Columbia or Harvard, is Brown.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.