\n<\/p>\n
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said the Pentagon is ending all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard University, marking the Trump administration\u2019s latest escalation against the Ivy League school.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University,\u201d Hegseth said in a statement posted on X, labeling Harvard as \u201cwoke\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hegseth, a former Fox weekend host, attacked the university as \u201cone of the red-hot centers of Hate America activism\u201d.<\/p>\n
The move to cancel military programs with Harvard follows months of threats, demands and lawsuits involving the Trump administration against Harvard. Trump has targeted federal funding at numerous universities in a broad push to force educational institutions to align themselves with the administration\u2019s worldviews, while alleging that US universities promote antisemitism and leftist ideology.<\/p>\n
Harvard has been a focal point in the administration\u2019s fight with higher education, and earlier this week Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would be seeking $1bn in damages from the university over allegations that it enabled antisemitism. Harvard\u2019s president, Alan Garber, has pushed back against those claims in the past year, rejecting those allegations as false and calling the administration\u2019s pressure campaign an attack on academic freedom.<\/p>\n
Hegseth has railed against what he describes as wokeness, sought to end diversity programs, and postured himself as an aggressive, brash defense secretary. On Friday, Hegseth framed Harvard as a radical leftist institution that sought to undermine the US armed forces.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo many faculty members openly loathe our military; they cast our armed forces in. a negative light and squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings,\u201d said Hegseth, who made no mention of the master\u2019s degree in public policy he earned from Harvard\u2019s John F Kennedy school of government.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith some exceptions,\u201d Hegseth added, \u201cthe Ivy League as a whole has pervasive institutional bias and a lack of viewpoint diversity, including the coddling of toxic ideologies that undercuts our mission.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is why, in two weeks\u2019 time, components of all of our departments \u2013 army, navy and air force \u2013 will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon\u2019s focus on \u201cbuilding lethality\u201d, Hegseth also said, \u201cno longer includes spending millions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Harvard alumnus ended his video message with: \u201cWe train warriors, not wokesters. Harvard: good riddance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegseth\u2019s attack on Harvard has been a theme of his political rhetoric for years. He disparaged the school in two of his books, and, in a live segment of the morning show Fox & Friends in 2022, he made a show of defacing his diploma and writing \u201cReturn to sender\u201d on it in large letters.<\/p>\n
During the same broadcast, Hegseth acknowledged that he was not really \u201creturning\u201d his degree, saying: \u201cPeople will say: \u2018This is just a stunt, you still have a degree.\u2019 And that\u2019s fine, I went, I got the degree, I walked, took the classes and all that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s campaign against top US universities has focused on a range of issues including pro-Palestinian protests, diversity programs, transgender policies and climate initiatives. Many universities, including Harvard, rely on federal funding for their research programs \u2013 giving the administration a means of coercing institutions with threats to cut off that cash flow.<\/p>\n
Among the administration\u2019s demands to Harvard are that the university end its diversity initiatives, ban face masks and provide information to US immigration authorities amid Trump\u2019s anti-immigrant crackdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said the Pentagon is ending all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard University, marking the Trump administration\u2019s latest escalation against the Ivy League school. \u201cThe @DeptWar is formally ending ALL Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University,\u201d Hegseth said in a statement posted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43910,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[304,22890,676,3632,1230,3292,348,526,910,22889],"class_list":{"0":"post-43909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-cut","9":"tag-fellowships","10":"tag-harvard","11":"tag-hegseth","12":"tag-pentagon","13":"tag-pete","14":"tag-programs","15":"tag-ties","16":"tag-training","17":"tag-wokesters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/43910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}