Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent decision to end the Pentagon’s academic partnerships with more than 20 universities and other institutions, including Harvard and other Ivy League schools, has provoked not a little alarmed commentary. In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month, Big Tech accountability advocate J.B. Branch and retired U.S. Air Force Major Allan E. Cameron argued that “U.S. military officers need to go to Harvard,” and that retreating from America’s flagship research and policy institutions is “a strategic retreat.”
An op-ed in The Hill by Northwestern emeritus law professor Steven Lubet quoted a former Navy SEAL who argued that “Hegseth is cutting off outside sources that provide information that is unavailable anywhere else, and invaluable to the successful prosecution of modern warfare.”
Whether or not Hegseth’s decision to untether senior military training from top-tier American universities is a prudential one in a time of manifold threats to national security, the repudiation of these institutions did not happen in a vacuum. Many decades of decisions by leadership and faculty at universities such as Princeton and Harvard (both alma maters of Hegseth) have created an academic environment that is so toxically left-wing that in many respects they are waging an ideological war against the United States and its founding principles.
A new collection of essays by Harvey C. Mansfield, who was on the faculty at Harvard from 1962 until 2023, shows how bad things have become in the academy, which should be seeking to maintain and perpetuate American excellence and superiority, not undermine and destroy it.
A Lack of Ideological Diversity
Mansfield describes attending Harvard’s most recent commencement in 2025. In his telling, every single speech — whether from academics, students, or honored guests — repeated talking points from the “left wing of the Democratic Party.” In his own Government Department, Mansfield noted that as of 2008, of a total of 50 professors, only three were conservative, a demonstrable result of affirmative action. Elsewhere he insightfully observes that efforts to hire more female faculty were, however, opposed to hiring more female conservative faculty. Fox News last year reported that 63 percent of Harvard faculty in the arts and sciences identified as liberal, and only 1 percent professed to be “very conservative.” And in 2024, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard as the worst college in America when it comes to free speech.
Harvard, of course, is not alone in this regard. At Yale, considered by many to be the top university in the country, Democrats outnumber Republicans 28 to 1 in the social sciences and humanities departments. A 2020 study found that at 32 “elite” colleges and universities, every single one was disproportionately leftist. The best was Northwestern, where the Democrat-to-Republican ratio was only 4 to 1 (this, mind you, in a nation in which registered Republicans and Democrats are consistently about equal). One article whose (accurate) analysis can only be described as risibly ridiculous, attempted to rank the Ivy League Schools by the degree of their liberality (hint: they’re all extremely left-wing).
An Academy Obsessed Less With Excellence Than Wokeism
The disproportionately left-wing character of the professors and student bodies at elite universities such as Harvard results in a curriculum most Americans would find bizarre, if not offensive. In 1986, Mansfield cautioned against a proposal to establish women’s studies as its own field of concentration at the university (now it’s ubiquitous across American higher education). Six years later, he warned that another proposal to initiate a concentration in environmental studies was representative of “transforming Harvard into an intellectual branch of the Democratic Party” — that field is also now a mainstay of contemporary academia.
Unsurprisingly, Mansfield, writing in 2004, found that Harvard’s history department, by comparison, didn’t have a single course on the American Revolution or on the nation’s founding. Is it any wonder so many Americans, even well-educated ones, have such ignorance, if not hatred of their country? In a 2025 op-ed published in the Harvard Crimson, Mansfield warned that “somehow, the more diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) we have, the less there is diversity of opinion.” Shortly afterward, he wrote another op-ed in which he observed that a preponderance of courses in the social sciences and humanities “teach that everything normal people believe is a stereotype,” a stereotype, of course, to be condemned.
This ideological radicalism doesn’t just affect students when they are in the classroom. Mansfield describes a sexual orientation meeting for new Harvard freshmen from 20 years ago in which the discussion refused to name the two sexes. Nor, Mansfield wryly notes, was the orientation willing to acknowledge the age-old truth that men and women “mostly like each other.” As universities increasingly have higher numbers of women than men, this trend has only been exacerbated, aggravating political, social, and romantic tensions between the sexes.
The Left Would Rather Sacrifice the Academy Than Reverse Track
Though many view the Ivy League as incomparably competitive, that’s only true when it comes to getting in. As Mansfield discusses, the quality of rigorous instruction is perceptively lacking. More than half a century ago, in 1975, he raised the issue of grade inflation at Harvard, noting that a remarkable 85 percent of students at Harvard were graduating with honors! In 1996, the average grade for all courses at the university was above a B-plus. In 2000, the Kennedy School of Government — one of the very institutions that has historically partnered with the U.S. military, and which awarded Hegseth a master’s — awarded A’s 70 percent or more of the time!
Some top American universities are still capable of producing important scientific research, and disconnecting the government and military from these university programs does risk harming our competitive advantage on the global stage. But, as Mansfield rightly argues, science cannot help us contemplate and determine right from wrong. This is the task of a classical education focused not only on acquiring knowledge or preparing students for lucrative professional careers, but training them in virtue and the rightly ordered good life, as the founding generation believed (and learned, at these very same institutions hundreds of years ago!).
Decades ago, Mansfield prophetically warned that those who risked the most in Harvard’s battle to realize affirmative action and DEI were its scientists, “who need the government’s money to carry on their work of usually expensive experimentation in laboratories.” If that’s the case, and if our elite institutions suffer a precipitous decline, the left has only itself to blame.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He is a regular contributor at many publications and the author of three books, including the upcoming “Wisdom From the Cross: How Jesus’ Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die)” (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).
