Pentagon to cut ties with top universities and think tanks

WASHINGTON – The Defense Department has decided to cut academic ties with nearly two dozen top universities and think tanks as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign against what he calls anti-American values and “wokeness.”

In a video published to social media Friday hours before the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Hegseth denounced the institutions in blistering language, calling them politically liberal institutions with “wicked ideologies” that were indoctrinating U.S. service members. He said that, beginning in the new school year in September, the Defense Department would bar service members from attending those universities.

In addition to Harvard University, which was banned earlier this month, the Defense Department said the banned institutions would include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, George Washington, Tufts, Saint Louis and Carnegie Mellon, as well as the College of William & Mary, Middlebury College and Queen’s University in Ontario.

When Hegseth cut ties with Harvard, it was seen as part of a wider pressure campaign by the Trump administration to force the university to cut a deal with the government. But some of the universities that were banned Friday have already agreed to a laundry list of demands from the Trump administration as part of an effort to remake the culture of higher education.

The Defense Department said it would also cut ties with seven high-profile think tanks in Washington known for their defense and national security analysis: the Center for Strategic and International Studies, New America, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Henry L. Stimson Center.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.