U.S. will regret Hegseth’s decision to end CMU military fellowships

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s move to end certain military fellowships at 21 disfavored universities, including Carnegie Mellon, will achieve the opposite of its purported intention.

He cites the need to train members of the Armed Forces to “think critically, free of bias or influence.” He asserts that the 21 elite institutions — which include Harvard, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — teach a “biased” perspective on the United States and its international affairs.

The secretary says removing these schools and using others will improve the “readiness” of America’s military for battle, but it will not.

CMU, for example, is a global center of innovation in robotics and artificial intelligence and a major center for the study of the rest of the world, with a longstanding relation to the U.S. government. Removing programs like the fellowship rejects the full advantage institutions like CMU — which President Trump visited during U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick’s Energy and Innovation Summit last July — give this country over the rest of the world. The more the administration breaks this partnership, the more it weakens America’s national security.

There are three problems with Hegseth’s claims.

First, even if we were to grant that the targeted institutions are “biased” in a way that intrudes on all classroom education, surely Hegseth should trust that members of the military studying at these institutions to have the intelligence to recognize the bias and the strength of character to maintain their principles.

The order appears to assume that the Department of Defense’s students are fragile and impressionable — that they are, to use a disparaging idiom he enjoys, “snowflakes.” This isn’t the message that should be sent to America’s soldiers seeking advanced education.

Second, the education Hegseth says he wants for his men and women, especially learning to “think critically,” necessarily includes confronting contrasting positions on key issues of history, philosophy, politics and strategy, argued by people who believe them and argue them well.

Military leaders who struggle to understand beliefs and worldviews beside their own will struggle to formulate coherent strategies against America’s rivals. If anything, the Armed Forces should seek out institutions where its students will experience a high level of intellectual friction — iron sharpens iron — so long as the institution is not actively and intentionally forming students contrary to the national interest. To be clear, there is no evidence of this at CMU.

Third, Hegseth’s description of what he’s looking for in an educational partnership reveals his own bias. This includes criteria like “embracing peace through strength” — a slogan popularized by Ronald Reagan that includes many now widely questioned assumptions about what makes for effective strategy.

The education needed to produce the kind of critical thinkers the military needs would not hold these pieties as beyond analysis or reproach.

Unsurprisingly, the list of institutions Hegseth proposes as alternatives includes those with a decidedly conservative bent that have curried favor with the Republican Party and the Trump administration, such as Hillsdale College in southern Michigan.

Hillsdale, with about 1,700 students, is a solid liberal arts college. The idea that institutions like Hillsdale can replace a major research university like CMU, with its numerous graduate programs in crucial areas like physical AI, machine learning and international relations, misunderstands the nature of higher education.

Hegseth’s announcement affects a program that currently has just five fellows at CMU and leaves untouched a variety of other Department of Defense-affiliated programs. This is notable, because last month he floated canceling a wider variety of tuition assistance programs for military members at 35 schools, including CMU. We hope that this smaller cutback is as far as it goes.

But even this is too far, threatening a partnership that makes America’s military better prepared for today’s responsibilities.