A Tale of Two Harvards

The decision by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to sever ties between the Pentagon and Harvard University holds a bitter irony. Two generations ago, during Vietnam, it was Harvard that didn’t want the military on campus (reserve officers training was ended). Now, 15 years later, it is the Department of War that is giving Harvard the boot — and it’s a Harvard-educated war secretary who is doing the booting.Call it the tale of two Harvards. The story traces back to the anti-Vietnam war protests that erupted on American colleges in the 1960s. Many top universities capitulated to the demands of the activist students and faculty and cast out ROTC programs and military recruiters from their campuses. Harvard, which in 1916 was the first campus to welcome ROTC, was no exception. The university closed the door on its military training program in 1969. The estrangement would continue for several decades. After the war, the anti-military cause was picked up by those who opposed the army’s exclusion of openly gay or lesbian servicemembers. Harvard welcomed back ROTC in 2011 when the government repealed a law known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that permitted homosexual individuals to serve so long as they concealed their sexual orientation. Yale and Columbia followed suit — or uniform.The scholar Ruth Wisse, then professor of Yiddish literature, reckoned that the message was clear, even as the justification shifted to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” from Vietnam: “Harvard students are too good for military service. Leave national defense to the farm boys and those who don’t make it to an elite college. Forty years of such scorn for the military will bring low any democracy.” Quoth she: “Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.” This was shockingly out of sync with Harvard’s history. At the center of its campus at Cambridge, Massachusetts, is Memorial Church. Its walls are inscribed with the names of Harvard students who had raced to join the army and other services in World War II, as in earlier conflicts, and gave their lives for their country. Harvard has among its graduates more holders of the Medal of Honor than any educational institution other than West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.ROTC returned to Harvard under President Drew Faust, the great-granddaughter of a West Point graduate. Five years later, she appeared at the service academy to sing the military’s praises. “The military is the last institution in which Americans have high confidence,” Ms. Faust marveled to the cadets. “Not organized religion, not government, not newspapers, not banks — you. You and all you represent.” Fast forward to Mr. Hegseth, who announced that the military would bid adieu to the Cambridge campus come the 2026 school year. “For too long, this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard, hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class. Instead, too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard — heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.”This time, the military was behind the break up. It reckoned that Harvard faltered by tolerating the campus antisemitism that surged after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and by maintaining identity politics in admissions. The Sun is a fan of the Army and Navy and of the Harvard that once was together with our military. It took Harvard 40 years to find its way back the first time. We hope that they can find a way back sooner this time.

A Tale of Two Harvards

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