Pete Hegseth's Attack on Harvard

"In a statement issued last Friday, Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with "heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks." He declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs. Hegseth's characterization makes it sound like students are lolling under the trees in Harvard Yard while getting instruction in Marxist theory from the Chinese Red Guards."

"This is, of course, nonsense, but Hegseth wants to paint colleges in general, and especially elite schools of the type he attended, as enemy territory. (His undergraduate degree is from Princeton, and he has a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, though he symbolically returned his diploma in 2022.) This campaign against education is not about what's actually being taught at Harvard; rather, Hegseth, among others, is using the school as a punching bag to express the generic social anxiety"

"Perhaps that's because these institutions have long been a kind of shorthand for an elite standing to which Hegseth clearly once aspired- as did his boss. The president brags regularly about his degree from the University of Pennsylvania and about his uncle, who taught at MIT. But Donald Trump, like Hegseth, must know that his views are for the most part unwelcome on these campuses, and rejection stings."

Harvard University has more than 100 students in ROTC who will graduate and serve in the military despite contempt from a defense official. Pete Hegseth charged that Harvard is graduating officers with “heads full of globalist and radical ideologies” and declared that the Pentagon would cut all ties with Harvard and its programs. Hegseth’s rhetoric portrays elite colleges as enemy territory and caricatures students as indoctrinated. Hegseth attended Princeton and earned a master’s from Harvard’s Kennedy School, which he symbolically returned. The campaign targets education as a proxy for social anxiety and status-based resentment within the MAGA movement.

Read at The Atlantic