Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon chief blocks officers from Ivy League schools and top universities

fortune.com

144 pointsgeox67 comments

Half of the best engineers I know come from a random state school, from a random country, and we should work way harder than we do on finding those people.

But also… the other half come from prestigious colleges, and the way you solve the first half is not by not hiring the second half.

Hiring costs time, money, and other engineers time and effort. Wasting money and time reviewing a pool with less good candidates will simply lose you business over time, as you waste more resources to obtain the same result.

Are American universities really turning out engineers with high GPAs and relevant coursework that are unqualified? Or even create a disadvantage for their employer?

I mean realistically you don’t know how good an engineer is until they get on projects and you see their work. But that’s true for Harvard too,

Yes. Ever do hiring, or run a significant interview system? I have. Us engineers thought the same way you did, but after a significant number of interviews, we went back over resumes versus interview performance to find ways to save costs/interview more per resource used, and surprisingly to us at that point quality of college was the biggest predictor. Lower quality schools simply had a less talented or trained pool, and it was significant.

And your line is thinking is how we end up with what is going on at the Pentagon, and less innovation in our industry :)

Ever run a company or do a lot of hiring? It’s not a line of thinking. If can cost effectively find equivalent candidates from a weaker pool, you’ll be rich selling that service.

So you are saying the Ivy League pool is the one with more better candidates?

The same pool where connections, rather than merit count? Where the candidates have (probably) been coddled by their loaded parents all their lives? Where they fake disabilities in order to get affordances such as better housing, "support" animals and so on?

Great! Let's just continue perpetuating institutionalized bias rooted in a non-metric driven hypothesis on candidate potential!

The decision has nothing to do with any of that tho. Te goal is to punish suspect liberals.

And to give advantage to candidate from right wing and conservative institutions. Because that is the oficial state ideology now.

Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?

Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.

Foot, meet gun.

Fascism always trends to incompetency because loyalty is more important than skill and knowledge.

So it’s just a matter of time before the US crashes?

I wouldn't say crash, but more decline. But many Americans including on HN and in SV don't like to see it.

They didn’t say that

It is simpler than that.

Fascism always trends to incompetency because it is stupid.

That was not my takeaway from the Oppenheimer movie.

Or from … history.

The Germans chose to extremely underinvest in their nuclear program to maintain financial and political support for their rocket program.

The rocket program was so fundamentally different from the Manhattan Project it’s hard to see the Germans doing anything like it.

I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.

I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.

Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.

Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.

The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.

I mentioned two as an example, but they expelled significantly more. In 1933 they brought in laws that immediately ousted many Jews from public positions, which caused a mass exodus of intellectuals from the country. James Franck was another prominent physicist who left in protest, and he went on to work directly for the Manhattan Project.

The Nazis drawing a distinction between "Jewish mathematics" and "German mathematics" was also very real.

It's hard to imagine these policies had no effect on their ability to do research, and that it was purely a matter of funding.

"Boris Stoicheff, wrote how the mathematician Edmund Landau was 'physically prevented from entering his classroom by about seventy of his students, some wearing SS uniforms.' They demanded 'German mathematics' instead of 'Jewish mathematics.' One estimate is that the 15% of scientists in Germany who had been fired accounted for about 60% of the country’s physics-based publications."

https://research.usask.ca/herzberg/resources/the-person/phys...

The nazi regime destroyed a lot of what today would be classified as "woke research" by the reactionary right. Sexuality studies, social studies and so on. The book burnings were not only about rooting out fiction, they destroyed research.

History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.

Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.

It's more complicated. At many of these top universities, woke means don't hire whites. And Jews are often lumped in with whites. The Jewish percentage at top schools has dropped dramatically as wokeism appeared. At Princeton, one top professor campaigns to "eliminate whiteness" and he's very open about it.

This is a plain admission that the administration has lost on the merits of their arguments.

Interestingly, Dartmouth, UPenn, and Cornell aren't on the Cancelled Senior Service College (SSC) Fellowships list. So this is some select Ivy Leagues only.

Maybe they like Cornell's existing military affiliation?

Meredith: You know, I once dated a couple of guys from Cornell. They were really nice, gave me a ride home.

Andy: I seriously doubt anyone from Cornell dated you.

Creed: It's pronounced "colonel." It's the highest rank in the military.

Andy: It's pronounced Cornell! It's the highest rank in the Ivy league.

Cornell guys are assholes. I know this from experience. I hope it’s changed, but doubt it has.

Each of those three bowed their head to D&I demands, paid the bribe-fine demanded by the U.S. president, and revised their diversity definitions as demanded. So of course they’re exempt; that’s why they chose to pay their protection fee, after all. For example:

https://info.cornell.edu/executive-orders/federal-agreement/

> The university was reluctant to pay $30 million to the federal government to settle the OCR complaints; however, the alternative course of action would involve years of legal actions against the government with an uncertain outcome and untold costs to careers and livelihoods.

Wait, I thought Republicans were against cancel culture?

They're against anyone cancelling their "culture"

Hegseth has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. The Vice President has a degree from Yale. Trump himself graduated from Wharton, one of the Ivy League business schools (although not one directly names in the memo).

Maybe they are right to block these institutions then?

If this is the quality of product produced what’s the point?

Our Harvard/Stanford etc management seemed less capable than products of state schools. It kind of shocked me as I thought once I got into startups and scaleups with Ivy League talent I’d be way over my head. Very much a let down.

They network their way to the top. Everybody else has to develop real skills.

I feel attacked as a Stanford/Princeton graduate. Yes, there are pieces of shit among the graduates, especially among the legacy admissions, but you can’t write off all of us by association.

The actual announcement - https://media.defense.gov/2026/Feb/27/2003881802/-1/-1/1/ALI...

I've TFed and CAed for SSC fellows eons ago and the fact is UMich (especially the International Institute [0]), VT (CETS [1] and CGIT [2]), ASU (GSI [3] and CAPS [4]), and UNC (ASC [5], ISA [6], CES [7], and TISS [8]) remain great programs and tend to be fairly liberal.

Surprised TAMU wasn't included.

Edit: can't reply

> and lo and behold

Yep, but everyone who's an SSC will self-select for Mich, UNC, ASU, and VT. SSC fellows are smart and are gunning for top exit opps in the public and private sector. Hillsdale, Regent, and Liberty don't offer that and would limit career options as they are deeply ideological programs.

[0] - https://ii.umich.edu/ii/about-us/centers-programs.html

[1] - https://liberalarts.vt.edu/research-centers/ceuts.html

[2] - https://www.cgit.vt.edu/index.html

[3] - https://nationalsecurity.asu.edu/

[4] - https://www.capsresearch.org/

[5] - https://africa.unc.edu/

[6] - http://isa.unc.edu/

[7] - https://europe.unc.edu/

[8] - https://tiss-nc.org/

My first reaction was, "watch, they're going to replace actual rigorous educational institutions with religious colleges" and lo and behold, "Liberty University" is at the top of the list for replacement civilian institutions.

Religious schools have long had the strongest cancel culture out there.

"One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong. Find which thing is not like the other by the time I finish this song!"

So it is not a purge, it is "blocking". One has got to love American propaganda.

Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard, FYI

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/26/langer-harvard-...

> Harvard itself is an incredibly inequitable place. Student organizations — and undergraduate social life more broadly — have been criticized for being stacked heavily against those without connections. And perhaps most insidious is Harvard’s unwavering preference for so-called ALDCs – athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff. Without dismantling our own elitism, how can Harvard begin to fight the product of it?

Yep. I was never more proud of my alma mater than when they announced they would no longer give preferential treatment to legacy students (students of alumni). Legacy students alone make up 1/3 of Harvard’s accepted students. (I’d say that’s an embarrassment, but for Harvard that’s a feature not a bug.)

The same way people in power will always cling to the advantages power gives them, afraid of starting from the same place as everyone else for fear they won’t make it on their merits alone.

I don’t feel the same. My own alma mater is a niche school. It officially gives admissions pref to legacies, but unofficially depends on parents sending their kids as the school is not well known.

Harvard on the other hand - people go to Harvard to become elite. That only works because they get to hobnob with princes and the like. Thats the point.

The Ivy’s do a good job of admitting non-elite students. I’m glad that pathway to eliteness is there.

I’m proud of my small liberal arts Alma mater. I have no desire to network with billionaires and princes (as opposed to say, brilliant engineers and researchers).

But I’m glad the legacies at Harvard are sharing a classroom with kids from Appalachia. And that only happens if you get in the legacies.

The wild thing is that America pretends itself that it is a meritocracy while ... literally defending deeply nepotistic class based system like this.

If the Harward did not took that many legacies, they would spread out to different schools. And mixed with others there. You dont need to collect kids of powerful in one place to achieve that.

I’m reassured by the fact that grads of non-Ivy Leagues do extremely well.

The focus on Harvard is really overblown.

True, even non-legacies do well from a place like Harvard.

But given a full 75% of American colleges give preferential treatment to legacy students, Harvard is the most visible representation of an unacknowledged caste system.

Something about, “I deserve this more than someone else because of who my parents are” really fires me up.

> The wild thing is that America pretends itself that it is a meritocracy while

If you haven’t been paying attention, the elite have give up on that lie. They know it’s indefensible to even the dumbest Americans anymore.

Additionally the risk is over. The American people are so disgustingly impotent, they no longer need to placate them with lies of meritocracy and other false values. They can now transparently tell you “we will rule you as we wish and face no consequences”. The Epstein saga solidifies this.

This is bordering on delusional lol.

You think folks who are kids of billionaires will be fraternising with some working class kid who got in via merit? That almost never happens.

If what you say is true (personally I think it's an overgeneralization) then there would be zero point to eliminating legacy admissions to begin with (since they won't be willing to socialize with those beneath them regardless of where they are). So either you're wrong, or you're right and the entire issue is a pointless one.

Do you have source on this? I’d love to learn more beyond our contradicting assumptions.

Too much willingness to disobey unlawful orders from the "woke left" I assume

Then UMich - a notably Dem leaning govt program - wouldn't be included.

Personally, I remember taking Fairbanks Center associated classes and noticing how we have the children of Chinese VVIPs sitting next to active duty members.

It sparked interesting conversations, but seeing someone who was a test pilot at Hanford sitting next to a scion of a Red Family was interesting to say the least.

The program also absolutely did used to publicly give advice to the CCP at the time, and on the listservs I'm still on I do still see publicly pronounced UFWD members responding and posting events in the Boston area.

Ofc, if I noticed this then it was absolutely known to three-letter agencies and State, and some of the institutions included are part of a larger culture war, but there is a kernel of truth - too many children of various countries dignitaries attended the program.

Edit: can't reply

> I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction

UMich isn't an isolationist program though - it's a program which imo is the closest to how foreign policy was managed under the Obama admin.

Noting that we have always been at war with Eurasia, given we actually are not at war with Eurasia, would it not be both normal and sensible to at least know your Eurasian counterparts?

I think isolationism amongst the war party is less helpful than some degree of interaction.

You casually drop a lot of acronyms and references to obscure programs (here and especially in parallel comment) on the apparent assumption that everyone reading does or should be clued in to the same acronyms. I feel you do so in good faith, but I wonder where the implicit assumption comes from that the 'rest of society' ('rest' w.r..t. whatever sub-group does in fact know about these programs intimately) ought to know what this sub-group knows.

Good question! Gimme the acronyms, terms, and context you don't know and I can give some context and meaning behind them. It's easy to fall into the trap of jargon with Gov stuff.

Thanks - well what I'm actually interested in is what imaginary line can be drawn most tightly (i.e. descriptively) around a social group that would be familiar with all of the acronyms and institute names you referenced in this post's comments. Like are they all history majors? Political science majors? Given that whatever nexus this is seems to attract VVIP's of multiple countries, I think it would be interesting to understand what institutional lever in society these folks are preparing to grip.

If it helps for perspective, I (like most HN folks) am coming from an engineering background so these are broadly unfamiliar to me.

First things first - let me level set about what the SSC is.

In federal jobs (civilian and service) in order to climb up the leadership track you need to take part in professional development courses.

A bunch of universities set up 10 month long fellowship and educational programs that would give these leadership track individuals some additional academic polish, teach them new skills, and allow them to network with private sector and other public sector leadership track individuals.

Anyone who has worked in the Federal Government

---

> Given that whatever nexus this is seems to attract VVIP's of multiple countries

No, that's just an American private school undergad thing.

China's Harvard and Yale is Harvard and Yale because they were the first programs to conduct mass outreach in China after Mao was toppled.

The Gulf's Ivies (other than the Ivies) is Georgetown and CMU because both GTown and CMU did a massive outreach ans brand positioning campaign in the Gulf.

The reality is, most decisionmakers (not political appointees) in the US actually did their undergrad at state flagships like UMich, UNC, and ASU or beltway schools and only ended up at an Ivy for grad school - as is the norm in the private sector.

In countries like China or much of the Gulf, brand name matters as it helps with climbing the ladder in those countries and it gives mobility that a domestic degree couldn't provide aside from at a handful of institutions. It's much easier to get into Harvard for an undergrad than to do the Gaokao to get into Tsinghua, and a Harvard degree gives you the ability to get expedited naturalization in Japan and much of Europe.

> Like are they all history majors? Political science majors?

Primarily Engineering (especially IEOR, ECE, MechE, and Aerospace), CS, and PoliSci. I myself was a double major in CS (specialized in systems) and PoliSci and spent a minor stint in grad school and

> it would be interesting to understand what institutional lever in society these folks are preparing to grip

At least in the US, it's just standard corporate management kinda work. The reality is, governments operate the same way that corporations do - you get "big picture" types (political appointees like most cabinet members in every institution) who are the public face for an organization, but the actual decisionmaking and strategy setting is done by careerists who are managing upwards.

Institutional inertia always wins (eg. It's why Obama's red line on Syrian chemical weapons was ignored by the DoD and why Trump's interventionist policy shifted to what it is today), and the reality is a lot of conflicts that have been bubbling in the background for decades are now reaching their precipice.

I know I didn't fully answer your question but it's a fairly complex question that I'm not sure I can fully do justice in a comment.

It's best to view shifts within the USG the same way you would see shifts in a large conglomerate like Pfizer or at a large R1 research institution like a UC Berkeley.

OK, that's helpful thank you -

I had to Google-AI & Gemini up some possible solutions to

"TFed and CAed for SSC fellows" Gemini only got the SSC plausibly correct - is it "SSC Fellows: Refers to Senior Service College Fellows, typically senior military officers or high-level civilians (such as those in the DAU-SSCF program) who participate in prestigious leadership development and strategic research programs at various institutions" (top source: Army War College, Senior Service College fellows program)

Would you consider yourself or your career-track natsec-adjacent / military-adjacent?

Google Search AI seemed to do better on the other acronyms: TFed: This is almost certainly shorthand for "Teaching Fellow" (TF) + "Education/Training." Context: A "Teaching Fellow" supports professors in higher education by leading discussions, grading, or mentoring undergraduate students. Meaning: The person has trained or mentored Teaching Fellows. CAEd: This likely refers to a parallel, specialized form of training for the fellows. Possible meaning 1: Course Advising/Education (helping TFs with their specific courses). Possible meaning 2: Career Advising/Education (helping TFs develop their professional skills). Context: Similar to how "Didactic Fellows" are trained to mentor peers in teaching skills. SSC Fellows [I suspect it choked on this one]: These are the recipients of the training. They are likely participants in a fellowship program (e.g., Summer Service/Studies Course, Special Subject Course) in a formal education context

TF = Teaching Fellow, CA = Course Advisor?

PS Do you find it odd that someone might feel it necessary to AI-up solutions to your acronyms in an effort to better understand where you're coming from?

CA just means Course Assistant/less rigorous TA at some institutions.

> Do you find it odd that someone might feel it necessary to AI-up solutions to your acronyms in an effort to better understand where you're coming from

Not really. It would be too difficult to give an entire crash course on fairly complex topics so I may as well go straight to the point and let people google-fu where possible. That's why I try to provide citations and links where possible.

Also, this conversation reminded me of an incident a couple years ago at Tufts [0][1] - and this was initiated by an ally (South Korea).

[0] - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-and-white...

[1] - https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/08/former-tufts-prof...

The list of replacements institutions from the memo states at the bottom:

> 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 Programs.

So it is definitely political and not based on merit.

As someone enrolled in an IVY and seeing the absurd speculation by random commenter's, this is ridiculous. I can only speak for Columbia, but the amount of work & study we do all for this country is immense. EVEN if you are partisan you should know there are RW or neoliberal elements active here. Our country and the many young people who want to be in public service will suffer from this.

And no, we are not whatever random ragebait curated LW “WOKE” that’s protrayed online.

You "work & study" all for your country? That is impressive. Where I'm from, most people educate themselves for their own benefit and not because of some greater nationalistic plan. But we also don't pledge allegiances every single day for 11+ years of schooling, maybe that helps.

Yeah, thats smart. /s

What’s next, a requirement for officers to be active alcoholics so their decision making skills are as compromised as the Secretary of Defense? It’s embarrassing to have a drunk as a cabinet level officer.

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