Return Pete Hegseth’s educational ideologies “to sender”

I’ll save you the trouble of Googling “notable Princeton alumni” — rest assured, the list is long. The dawn of a new presidency and subsequent surge of administrative nominations mean a new cycle of Princeton names entering our discourse, including Pete Hegseth: Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. It’s reasonable to ask, out of countless politically influential Princeton alumni, why single out Hegseth?

But Pete Hegseth is not simply a Princeton graduate — and not simply a Princeton graduate with sexual assault allegations and a history of homophobic remarks. During his stint as publisher of The Princeton Tory, Hegseth advocated for the superiority of Western ideals in education and denounced what he described as the “gratuitous glorification of diversity.” While acknowledging diversity’s “value,” he called it a “[distraction]” from Princeton’s “original academic focus”: “the pillars of Western civilization.”

Two and a half years ago, as a Fox and Friends co-host, Hegseth took to live television to reiterate his call for alumni to protect their children from the new “leftist cause” of their alma maters. After scribbling “return to sender” in Sharpie across his Harvard diploma, Hegseth was asked about the fate of his Princeton degree. He hesitated to cut ties: “not yet.”

It should worry us greatly that Hegseth is less eager to denounce his Princeton connections than his Harvard ones. As current students, it is our responsibility to embody a culture at Princeton that embraces multiplicity of perspective — vital foundations of our country and institution. We must become alumni who won’t allow others like Hegseth to attack the value of diversity in their insistence on single-minded, right-wing dogma.

Princeton’s pedagogical and extracurricular offerings rightfully center ideological pluralism and diverse perspectives. This semester’s course catalog includes classes on Caribbean Women’s History, Race, Indigeneity, and the Environment, South Asian Studies, and the politics of Gangsters, just to name a few. Between Global Seminars, service experiences, and study abroad programs taking place in 140 countries, there is a wealth of opportunities for broad intellectual exploration. These courses teach us about perspectives that may be beyond our intellectual comfort zones and expose us to a diverse array of cultures — because why do we attend the University if not to challenge our preconceptions?

While these programs are thoroughly advertised by the University, we have to view them with a renewed sense of value, even urgency, and as more than just exciting chances to get off campus or enhance a resume. These programs are not isolated from but rather integral to the rest of our Princeton experience. They diversify, and thus develop, our understandings of humanity, power, and privilege: an act of resistance to Hegseth’s peddling of a narrow-minded educational vision.

Contrary to Hegseth’s beliefs, the best and perhaps only way to understand the United States’ history, relationship with the rest of the world, and future is to be educated on and immersed in multiple cultural and intellectual perspectives. Through taking advantage of the programs offered at Princeton, we gain holistic insight into how people interact with government and systems of power, create art, write, research, coalesce, and disperse: critical concepts that allow us to be well-informed community members and human beings.

Only through the embrace of diversity of perspective that Hegseth decried as a Princeton undergrad and 20 years later berated on live television do we become alumni well prepared for the service of our communities and the world. An education built on cultural diversity makes us globally grounded, interconnected, and profoundly empathetic. His confining approach to education leaves little room for admiration and criticism, hope and horror, to coexist. Yet, embracing that contradiction is precisely what allows us to balance pride and criticism, not against America, but looking at it through clear eyes. He treats American history, patriotic ideals, and the “pillars of Western civilization” as if they were made of glass, as if “cross-cultural encounters” and critical race theory could shatter them.

Hegseth has excoriated how diversity is embraced as the “holy grail” of the academic experience — but he mischaracterizes the true value of exposure to a range of perspectives. Diversity is not a leftist ideal that has overtaken the priorities of academic institutions. It is inseparable from those priorities in the first place, the foundation of intellectual exploration, learning, and challenge. Through centering diverse ideas, narratives, and cultures in our intellectual pursuits, we can reject Hegseth’s simplistic, exclusionary understanding of history. We will become alumni who wield the consideration of multiple perspectives as a tool of strength and clarity, who seek communication rather than ideological siloing in the face of conflict.

We can use global and diverse learning opportunities at Princeton to remind ourselves and each other that education is not meant to impart a rigid worldview. It is meant to help us comprehend and inhabit a changing world and our responsibilities to it as alumni. Rather than elevate one set of cultural values and exclude or silence another, we can let that multiplicity be what guides our intellectual development.

Hegseth’s defacement of his Harvard diploma on live television suggests his understanding of education as a transaction between him and the University, a process that ends with the awarding of a diploma. This political theater seems to encourage the next generation to simply accept and regurgitate the fixed worldview he perceives as traditional, correct, and American, ending all intellectual exploration the day they graduate rather than setting themselves for lifelong openness and embrace of change.

If we quietly draw lines around ourselves and each other, attempting to parse out which people and which ideas belong at Princeton and which don’t, we risk treating our education as a pre-packaged worldview, void of difference, and functioning to silence the fount of true intellectual power: criticism and questioning. We must protest Hegseth’s reductionist point of view and resist its association with Princeton by declaring and then demonstrating that embracing an explorative, expansive education is what truly defines — in the words an alum used to describe Hegseth — a “typical great Princetonian.” If Hegseth appears on live TV and scribbles in Sharpie across his Princeton diploma, we’ll know we’ve done something right.