College President Larry Arnn thanked Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week for including Hillsdale College on a list of potential partners for active-duty military graduate fellowships after the War Department announced it would cut ties with many elite schools and education nonprofits.
“I admire your mission to equip our military with the lethality necessary to protect our national interest, while providing them with an education that instills a deep knowledge and love for the principles of the Founding,” Arnn wrote in a March 30 letter first obtained by Fox News. “The College has been committed to providing an education that preserves ‘civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety’ in America for more than 180 years now.”
Arnn said the college would be “honored” to educate U.S. military officers through the program but also clarified that the college would not accept any government money, in keeping with its longstanding policy.
“We have nothing to gain financially in this effort,” Arnn said in the letter. “Hillsdale College refuses all government money to preserve its independence and guard against the anti-American ideologies that you have noticed infecting so many of our colleges and universities. Whatever we do in this program will be funded through private sources.”
The letter comes after a Pentagon memo dated Feb. 27 announced 93 Senior Service College fellowships at 22 institutions — including Harvard University, MIT, and Yale University — would be terminated at the end of the academic year. Hillsdale is listed among 21 potential new partner institutions, as previously reported by The Collegian.
The program provides funding for outstanding active-duty senior officers and select civilian government employees to pursue graduate studies and research beneficial to the military, according to the Army War College website.
“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,” Hegseth said in the memo.
