US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed military officers to stop attending professional education and fellowship programmes at 22 universities worldwide. This comes as part of changes to the Pentagon’s approved list of Professional Military Education (PME) institutions for advanced military training, which now include artificial intelligence (AI) and space. The decision was outlined in a recent memo that removes several Senior Service College fellowship programmes, effective for the 2026–2027 academic year.The cancelled list includes universities such as Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. The move follows Hegseth’s earlier decision to end professional military education partnerships with Harvard, citing concerns that some institutions on the list are “anti-American”.

Full list of universities Pentagon has cancelled for US Army officers

Here’s the list the US Department of War has cancelled for the US Army’s Senior Service College (SSC) fellowship programmes:

Total: 93 SSC fellowships cancelled across 22 institutions.

List of colleges Pentagon may partner for US Army programmes

The memo also proposes a new group of partner institutions, including Liberty University, George Mason University, Pepperdine University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Michigan, the University of Nebraska, the University of North Carolina, Clemson University, and Baylor University, even as several of the removed schools have previously collaborated with the US military on areas such as artificial intelligence research.

In the memo, the Pentagon wrote that “these institutions meet 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 programmes.”