Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the cancellation of 93 Senior Service College fellowships at 22 universities and think tanks on February 27, effective for the 2026-2027 academic year. The banned list includes Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Tufts, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. Major Washington think tanks, including Brookings, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations, also lost their fellowships.
Hegseth, who holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard, announced the move in a video on X, calling the targeted schools "factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain."
The Carnegie Mellon problem
The most puzzling name on the cut list is Carnegie Mellon. The Army's AI Integration Center is physically located at Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh, selected specifically for the university's top-ranked AI and robotics programs. The center runs an immersive 36-month AI Technician Program with CMU, trains officers through master's and PhD tracks there, and coordinates multi-million-dollar research contracts across predictive maintenance, autonomous vehicles, and battlefield decision-making.
So the Department of Defense is now telling senior officers they cannot attend graduate programs at the same university where the Army literally houses its AI hub. Neither the Army's AI center nor Carnegie Mellon responded to press inquiries about how this will work in practice, according to Fortune.
Johns Hopkins SAIS presents a similar contradiction: the Space Force had partnered with the school for officer-level education in both intermediate and senior programs. That relationship is now severed under the same memo.
What replaces them
The replacement list includes 15 civilian universities and three senior military colleges. Liberty University, Hillsdale College, and Regent University sit alongside larger research institutions like the University of Michigan, Arizona State, and Clemson. The memo says partner schools were selected for "intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries, minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department, and Graduate-level National Security, International Affairs, and/or Public Policy Programs."
That last criterion, "minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department," is doing a lot of work. It effectively screens out any institution whose faculty or students have criticized Pentagon policy. Michigan has been vocal on various political issues over the years, which makes its inclusion interesting, or possibly temporary.
What this actually covers
Some important context that got lost in the initial coverage: this is specifically about Senior Service College fellowships, the programs that send colonels and senior civilian officials to get graduate degrees or spend time at think tanks. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called it "Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values." Officers currently enrolled can finish their programs, per the memo.
The order does not appear to affect broader research contracts, GI Bill usage, or the Army's existing AI partnerships with CMU. Those operate under different funding mechanisms and authorities. But the signal it sends is hard to miss: the department now explicitly considers a school's political posture when deciding where to invest in officer education.
Hegseth also announced a "top to bottom" review of the military's internal war colleges, promising to ensure they focus on "developing the most lethal and effective leaders and war fighters the world has ever known." No timeline was given for that review.
The bigger bet
The timing is notable. The same week, OpenAI secured a deal to provide AI services to the Pentagon after the Trump administration dropped Anthropic as a government AI provider. The department is simultaneously reorganizing which universities train its leaders and which AI companies build its tools, and the through line in both cases is political alignment over technical capability.
Ninety-three fellowship slots across 22 institutions is not a massive number in absolute terms. But the institutions being cut have historically produced the officers who shape defense strategy at the highest levels. Whether Liberty University and Hillsdale College can replicate that pipeline is a question nobody in the Pentagon's announcement bothered to address.
The new fellowship assignments take effect this fall.
