On February 27, 2026, the United States Department of Defense issued a memorandum, entitled “Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities With American Values,” that eliminated Senior Service College (SSC) Fellowships at Tufts University and 13 colleges and universities. The list includes Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Columbia, and Yale, as well as non-profit think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Tufts currently hosts six officers to study in its International Security Studies Program (ISSP) at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts’s graduate school for international relations. The SSC Fellowship program, according to the United States Army War College, provides U.S. Army Officers “opportunities to study and evaluate national security policy, strategy, and operational issues to substantially enhance their ability to participate in the formulation and implementation of national security policy.” While the order allows these currently-enrolled officers to continue their studies, starting in the 2026-2027 school year, new officers will not be provided the option to study at Tufts going forward.
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, since it was founded in 1933, has a long-standing tradition of educating members of the U.S. military. The late Robert L. Pfalzgraff, Jr., founder of the ISSP in 1971, recalls that the Fletcher School received military fellows before the ISSP was established, in his 2013 history of the program. At that point, while students studied in the security discipline, the Fletcher curriculum “lacked a cohesive, integrated international security studies field.” The ISSP has addressed this shortcoming, providing a more structured international security program. The Military Fellows program, in particular, receives officers from the armed services who study at Fletcher and provide other students with insight into the military. Abigail Linnington, current director of the ISSP, outlined the structure of the program in a statement to The Tufts Tribune. “During the year, military fellows audit a full complement of graduate courses across Fletcher’s ten fields of study, facilitate class discussions in the core international security course, ‘The Role of Force,’ and author research papers,” she said. “In addition, they mentor U.S. and international students in our activities beyond the classroom.”
The Military Fellows program has received consistent praise from university faculty and staff alike. David Logan, an assistant professor of security studies at Fletcher, told the Tribune in a statement that the program “has for decades been an important and valuable part of ISSP” and that the Military Fellows “support ISSP programming, enrich classroom discussion, and help the broader Fletcher community reflect on how to bridge the academic and policy worlds.” University spokesperson Patrick Collins shared a similar statement, saying that “[the fellows] enrich our Fletcher community and are integral to the field of international affairs.” Linnington expressed her regret about the department’s decision, stating that “it is unfortunate that the Department of Defense has chosen to prohibit the [Armed] Services from sending Senior Service College Fellows to Tufts University.”
While the current SSC Fellows themselves did not respond to a request for comment, Logan shared that in his experiences working with the program, “Fellows have universally expressed that their time at the Fletcher School is important to their continued development as rigorous, ethical, and effective national security practitioners.”
The Defense Department, when asked about the decision to cancel Tufts SSC Fellowship programs, directed the Tribune to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s video statement circulated on YouTube and other social media on December 6, 2025, and to a February 2026 statement by Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell. Secretary Hegseth’s statement, entitled “Harvard is WOKE; The War Department is NOT,” accuses “America’s highly ranked universities” of “no longer liv[ing] up to their founding principles as bastions of free speech, open inquiry, and committ[ing] to the American values that make our country great.” Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, directly accuses Harvard of being “one of the red-hot centers of Hate America activism” and stated that its faculty “openly loathe” the U.S. military. “We train warriors, not wokesters,” he quips.
Sean Parnell adds in his later statement regarding the memorandum that the affected universities “diminish critical thinking, have significant adversary involvement, or fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism.” Realism is a school of thought in international relations theory that views global politics as an anarchic system in which states act in their own self-interest and struggle for power.
However, university faculty and staff seem to disagree with the Defense Department’s accusations. Logan described the program as a “welcoming intellectual home for the Fellows, equipping them with new tools and perspectives and giving them the time, space, and support to reflect more deeply on how to address international and national security challenges.” Patrick Collins added that Tufts “remain[s] deeply committed to supporting those who serve our nation.”
Despite the DoD’s characterizations, Tufts’s programs have a prestigious reputation among international relations authorities across the country. Tufts and the Fletcher School consistently receive high marks as top international relations programs. Foreign Policy ranks the university within the top 10 in the magazine’s lists for master’s programs and PhD programs for policymakers, and in the top 20 for its undergraduate and academic PhD programs. These reputational rankings are formulated by asking IR professionals and scholars to list the five best places to study for each level of degree.
The Defense Department, though, has its own criteria for determining which schools offer the best education for military officers. In the memorandum, these are noted as “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.” In accordance with these standards, 21 “Potential New Partner Institutions” are listed as replacements. The “Civilian Education Institutions” named include Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine University, and the University of Tennessee, among others. The only partner institution with a similar Foreign Policy ranking to the cancelled institutions is the University of Michigan.
Nearly all of the potential partner institutions have more conservative leanings than the current host colleges and universities. Liberty University is ranked #1 for “Most Conservative Colleges in America” on Niche, and Pepperdine University was described as a “paradise for right-wing academics” in the book Passing on the Right. Hillsdale College, in partnership with conservative educational media organization PragerU, created “Freedom Truck Mobile Museums,” which present the history of America’s founding through interactive exhibit content. This initiative, which is currently traveling the country, has faced criticism for excluding histories of traditionally marginalized people and for “blurring the lines between reality and fiction” in its usage of AI-generated videos of historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Betsy Ross.
This is not the first time that the federal government has taken such action, and it is not the first time that the Fletcher School has been censured by a presidential administration.
In a session of Congress on February 21, 1972, Representative Robert Drinan (D-MA) brought to light that Navy Secretary John H. Chafee had issued a list entitled “Civilian Educational Institutions to Which Naval Officers May Not Apply for Enrollment in Graduate Educational Programs—as of October 1971.” This list “blacklisted” 15 colleges and universities that ended their Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs. On this list was none other than Tufts, which had a successful ROTC program until decreasing enrollment and intense student scrutiny led to its discontinuation in 1969. In response to a letter from Representative Drinan, Secretary Chafee confirmed the decision, agreeing with a statement made by the House Armed Services Committee that called it “morally wrong” for the military to continue its educational programs at institutions that had “chosen not to cooperate with the military services.” In 1976, Tufts allowed its students to enroll in ROTC in coordination with MIT, a relationship that still exists today, offering Army and Air Force ROTC.
Today, morals are not on the face of the issue. In his statement, Hegseth argues with economics, stating that it was in the best interest of the department to “maximiz[e] our return on investment when officers and senior enlisted service members attend expensive civilian universities.” He pledged to “maximize taxpayer value” by no longer “spending millions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country.”
Underneath the economics, though, the American battle for higher education is undeniably a war of ideas. Out of our universities pour forth a river of ideas—the expertise and ideology of its constituents: professors of international relations, in this case. As one sees here, it is not unheard of for the hand of the federal government to reach down and—sometimes softly, sometimes not—attempt to steer that river in what it deems to be a favorable direction.
While President John F. Kennedy never made it to his remarks at the Trade Mart in Dallas, TX on Nov. 22, 1963, his undelivered speech, praising the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, highlights an essential maxim: “Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security.” Hegseth seems to be making this same argument—cutting off what parts of the river he deems to be laden with ignorance and misinformation. How these are defined and whom we trust to define them may hold the operative role, then, for the preservation of our country’s security.
Photo via The Fletcher School