When people first come across a detail in Pete Hegseth’s academic biography, they often stop in their tracks. The current US Secretary of Defense, who has prioritized reducing military tuition aid to Harvard and Princeton, has a Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor of Arts in Politics from Princeton University. both establishments. both levels. Additionally, he allegedly wrote “Return to sender” on his Harvard diploma and mailed it back to Cambridge in 2022 on live television as a protest against the teaching of critical race theory there.
It’s hard to tell what to make of that picture. A man returning his credentials from a school that took ten years of his life to complete has an almost theatrical quality. Hegseth enrolled in the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009 but left after just one semester. He eventually earned his M.P.P. in 2013. Although it complicates the story of a clean rejection, that is not an uncommon route for someone balancing advocacy work and military service.
Hegseth was raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota, a suburb north of the Twin Cities, where his father was a high school basketball coach. He was born in Minneapolis in 1980. It is worth noting that he was the valedictorian of Forest Lake Area High School in 1999. valedictorian. In addition, he became an all-state basketball player and set school records for three-point shooting. Looking at that profile gives the impression that the person was genuinely motivated, both academically and athletically, long before politics or television came into the picture. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what he envisioned for himself at eighteen, he reportedly rejected a basketball offer from West Point in favor of Princeton, which speaks to his aspirations at the time.
He joined the ROTC at Princeton several months prior to the September 11 attacks. He majored in politics and went on to become publisher and chief editor of The Princeton Tory, the school’s conservative student newspaper. In this role, he was involved in a number of campus controversies, including editorials that provoked harsh criticism from both faculty and student government. He was obviously not a passive presence at the university, regardless of one’s opinion of the content. After graduating in 2003, he was commissioned as an infantry officer through the ROTC program. Prior to the full development of his military career, he worked briefly as an equity markets analyst at Bear Stearns.
His service record is authentic and deserving of direct recognition. After leading a platoon at Guantanamo Bay and serving as an infantry officer with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, where he was awarded a Bronze Star, he spent eight months as a teacher at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul. He became a major. These credentials are not ornamental. He had already visited more areas of the world’s ongoing conflicts than the majority of national security policy scholars ever do by the time he ended up attending Harvard for his graduate degree.
The way Hegseth appears to use or reject education depending on the situation may be more significant than the educational narrative. Citing what he refers to as anti-military bias, the Pentagon under his direction has reduced graduate tuition aid to Harvard, Princeton, and numerous other universities. In states with a Republican leaning, the list of approved alternatives tends to favor public universities. Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown, called the strategy “just plain dumb,” contending that it implies military officers cannot be relied upon to think critically in prestigious classrooms.
Observing all of this, one gets the impression that Pete Hegseth’s education is actually crucial to comprehending him—not the degrees per se, but rather the complex relationship he seems to have with what they stand for. They were earned by him. He is angry with them. He makes policy out of that resentment. It’s difficult to describe that story as simple.
