By Rob Maness for THE WASHINGTON POST
When an active-duty Army brigadier general uses the pages of The Washington Post to argue that elite universities and the military “should be friends, not foes,” he is not merely offering a personal reflection on his 1995 Harvard education. He is publicly counter-signaling the Secretary of War’s deliberate policy to align national security fellowships and military-academic partnerships with the principles of merit, cohesion and warfighting effectiveness rather than the divisive frameworks of DEI.
That policy is not an attack on education. It is a necessary correction after years in which taxpayer-supported and military-funded programs funneled officers into institutions that had subordinated truth-seeking and unit cohesion to identity-based equity mandates. Cutting or conditioning ties with programs like the Kennedy School’s national security fellowship at Harvard was a direct response to that reality, not ideological pique.
As a 1995 graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School myself, I have a clear baseline for comparison. The institution I attended emphasized rigorous policy analysis, public service, and preparing leaders to strengthen the republic. It was not yet dominated by the sprawling DEI bureaucracies, mandatory diversity statements and grievance-oriented curricula that later took root across elite academia. The transformation was not subtle. What began as expanded access and viewpoint diversity evolved into institutional capture driven by DEI, an approach whose intellectual foundations lie in Marxist critical theory. That body of thought reframes every institution and relationship through the lens of oppressor and oppressed identity groups, prioritizing group conflict and equity of outcome over individual merit, shared purpose or objective standards.
This ideological shift has real consequences for the military, which depends on the opposite: a color-blind focus on competence, character and shared purpose. When universities embed training that draws from critical theory traditions, they import a worldview that treats the armed forces as extensions of systemic power structures rather than instruments of national defense. The result is pressure toward division by race and identity, erosion of unit cohesion and distraction from the core mission of winning wars.
