The Pentagon announced it cancelled Senior Service College (SSC) fellowships at Georgetown and other elite universities effective the 2026-2027 school year, according to a memo signed Feb. 27 by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“We will no longer invest in institutions that fail to sharpen our leaders’ warfighting capabilities or that undermine the very values they are sworn to defend,” the memo said.
Senior Service College fellowships are offered as career-enhancing programs that prepare senior level civilian officials for high-level roles in defense and national security. The Pentagon has cancelled 93 fellowship programs at 22 institutions, six of which are Georgetown students. Georgetown had the fourth-most fellowships cancelled of any university. Students who have already begun their studies under the program will be allowed to complete their education.
The universities affected include Georgetown University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Brown University, Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton University, Saint Louis University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Middlebury College, College of William and Mary, and Queen’s University.
In a video posted to X on Feb. 27, Hegseth also announced that the Department of War will no longer send active-duty students to “Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale and many others,” though it is unclear which other universities, including Georgetown, will be impacted. He said that the Pentagon will no longer support universities that promote “woke” and “leftist ideology.”
“They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness,” Hegeth said in the video, referring to Ivy League and similar institutions.
This decision comes after a Feb. 6 memo and press release that announced it severed academic ties with Harvard University, and would consider cutting tuition assistance programs for active-duty graduate students at elite universities, including Georgetown.
The memo also offers a list of universities that may partner with the Pentagon to replace the SSC fellowships that were eliminated, including Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine University, the University ofTennessee, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, Iowa State University, University of North Carolina, Clemson University, Arizona State University, Baylor University, University of Florida, Regent University, Auburn University, and Hillsdale College.
The universities were proposed because they met the following criteria: “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.”
Hegseth graduated from Princeton University in 2003, and received his master’s from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2013, while several other Pentagon appointees are alumni of schools on the list, including Yale, Princeton, and Harvard Business School.
