PROVIDENCE – In Newport on Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Naval War College faculty and students he had ended their longstanding partnership with Brown University, warning that the military’s education system has become “dangerously civilianized.”
Hegseth said he terminated a memorandum of understanding between the two institutions last month.
But his remarks “caught everyone off guard,” according to Dr. Adam C. Levine, who has facilitated the partnership for 10 years on Brown’s behalf.
“It caught Brown University off guard. It caught everyone at the Naval War College off guard,” Levine, a professor of emergency medicine and international and public affairs at Brown, said in an interview. “None of them had any idea he was going to say that.”
An email and other documents obtained by the Globe show the Naval War College discontinued the initiative centered on improving distribution of humanitarian aid on Tuesday, the day after Hegseth’s speech.
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Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has taken dramatic actions to alter the military’s relationship with higher education, as he has decried some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities for promoting what he has called “wokeness and weakness.”
A policy that took hold this school year barred members of the military from attending fellowships at Brown, as well as Columbia and Harvard universities, among other elite institutions that Hegseth, himself a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard, said have become “factories of anti-American resentment.”
In his Newport address, Hegseth announced 33 directives centered on overhauling the nation’s war colleges – instructions, he said, that would stamp out “destructive ideologies” and “the worst pathologies of contemporary civilian higher education” while promoting a “resolute warrior ethos.”’
Speaking of the Naval War College’s work with Brown, Hegseth said, “The only place more stridently ideological in one direction, more than Columbia or Harvard, is Brown. It was long past due to end that relationship.”
For a decade, the partnership had brought together professionals from both schools at an annual symposium to collaborate on how civilians and military personnel work with one another to coordinate humanitarian assistance in war zones and after natural disasters.
Most recently, in May, the workshop attracted about 100 high-level US military commanders, as well as officials from multiple foreign militaries and representatives from United Nations agencies, Levine said.
“You have the chance for someone from Doctors Without Borders to sit next to somebody from the U.S. Marines and have a conversation with each other, and it’s probably the only place in the world where that has been able to happen because it’s a neutral space that folks can collaborate with each other,” Levine said.
“All sorts of ideas come out,” he added.
The effort has produced numerous research articles and studies, and more importantly, has real and meaningful impacts for people facing dire situations in the United States and around the world, according to Levine.
Part of the work involves finding ways to make sure warfare follows legal restrictions and treaties, to reduce impact on civilians, he said.
“To call that ‘woke’ is a true misunderstanding of what civil-military humanitarian coordination entails,” Levine said.
Former students who attended Hegseth’s speech at the Naval War College were shocked and upset, said Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations and political science at Brown, who said she teaches her students “how to win a war.”
“He’s congratulating himself for destroying this thing that has been really valuable,” McDermott said.
Asked about the end of the partnership, Joshua L. Wick, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, referred to the department’s February memorandum about barring military personnel from attending fellowship programs at select schools, including Brown.
“Beyond this we don’t have anything additional to share,” Wick wrote in an email.
The Pentagon did not respond to further questions about when the nonbinding agreement with Brown was terminated.
The collaboration is one of “multiple layers of partnership” Brown has shared with the Naval War College over the past 15 years, including “collaborative research and teaching across the institutions,” according to Brian Clark, a spokesperson for Brown.
“Our understanding based on that termination notice and the statements made during Monday’s event at the Naval War College is that these productive collaborations will not continue,” Clark wrote in an email on Thursday. “Our hope is that there is opportunity for these partnerships to resume at some point moving forward.”
Still, Brown has other affiliations with the military, including agreements to allow ROTC participation by undergraduate students, Clark said. The university has also “more than quadrupled” its number of veterans enrolled as undergraduates in recent years, he said.
Last year, Brown reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore $50 million in federal research funding. Clark said the memorandum terminated by Hegseth is a separate matter, not connected to that agreement.
John N. Friedman, dean of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown, wrote in an email Brown’s collaborations with the military have been beneficial.
“Welcoming active-duty members of the military, veterans, and ROTC students to campus, and working together on research and teaching, is critical to advancing our collective understanding and impact on military-related issues,” Friedman wrote.
Brown’s ties to the Naval War College have been especially valuable for academics, as military personnel provide important perspectives for their work, according to Robert Blair, an associate professor of political science and international and public affairs.
For all of the Trump administration’s complaints that universities are out of touch with reality, the decision to end the relationship between Brown and the Naval War College is ironic, Blair said.
“These were the sorts of mechanisms that would really force you to think hard about the practical implications of … conceptual, theoretical work that you were doing,” Blair said.
“If anything, it’s probably only going to exacerbate the problem,” Blair added.
McDermott has already seen tangible consequences of the Pentagon’s withdrawal from the Ivy League.
After Hegseth terminated the military’s fellowship program for senior officers with Brown and other top-tier schools, two of McDermott’s students opted to go elsewhere because the military would not pay for them to attend Brown, while a third student quit the US Air Force altogether to pursue a PhD at Brown, McDermott said.
Other ramifications are subtle but real: Military and non-military students provide each other a “reciprocal education … that is not necessarily measurable, but that is quite profound over time,” McDermott said. Some of her undergraduate students have gone on to join the US armed forces because they were inspired by military fellows and students on campus, she said.
McDermott’s father spent his career in the US Navy and was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when it was attacked, she said. The classes she teaches focus on topics such as border surveillance and battle strategy – exactly the training military officers should get, she said.
“The very first day of class, the very first thing I say is, ‘If you want a class that says, “Peace and love and the bombs will go away,” go take a class in anthropology,’” McDermott said.
To be clear, McDermott doesn’t support war – the ongoing one in Iran “is a disaster,” she said.
“But if you’re in a war, you’re better off winning than losing, and you better know how to do that, right?” McDermott said. “So that’s how I teach it, and I don’t see any part of that that’s ‘woke.’”
Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.