Back then, Hegseth was promoting the idea of establishing a top-notch public math and science high school in his home state of Minnesota. His political blueprint called for allying with state Representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, who had championed the issue. She was one of a dozen people he interviewed for his research and figured prominently in his thesis.
Hortman tragically became a household name three months ago, when a gunman assassinated her and her husband and shot a second Minnesota lawmaker and his wife. The targeted political violence shocked the nation but got only glancing attention from the Trump administration.
The central argument of Hegseth’s 2013 paper was that students across Minnesota — and America — were being left behind other countries in STEM education. The solution, Hegseth wrote, was a merit-based school for the “best and brightest” students, but not at the exclusion of equity. The school should “ensure a balance of race, class, gender and geography,” though he didn’t specify how that should be achieved.
Calling past efforts to recruit minority and female students to science and technology programs “great” goals, Hegseth wrote he would want to “complement—not compete with—existing efforts.”
Last week, Hegseth stalked the stage in Quantico, Va., and scolded the nation’s military leaders he summoned there for tolerating “fat generals” and “beardos,” among other perceived lapses. He claimed that the military has weakened standards by chasing diversity and put troops at risk.
“No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris,” Hegseth told his commanders. “We are done with that shit.”
When reached by the Globe, a spokesperson for Hegseth said the secretary’s views have not wavered over time.
“His views from 2013 are consistent with his views now as Secretary of War: meritocracy should reign supreme over woke ideology and DEI,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement.
The tone of Hegseth’s thesis is far different than last week’s speech, and the pugilistic pieces Hegseth wrote a decade earlier when he was a Princeton University undergraduate and the publisher of the campus’s conservative magazine.
At the Princeton Tory, he decried the “distractions of diversity” and, with other editors, warned that the New York Times’s decision to publish same-sex marriage announcements could lead to normalization of incest and bestiality.
Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson, also asserted that Hegseth’s assignment at Harvard was to “write a paper from a bipartisan perspective.” But one of Hegseth’s faculty advisers at Harvard told the Globe there was no such requirement or mandate for moderation. The assignment was to write a paper that addressed a policy or management problem for an organization that the student was affiliated with before Harvard and make recommendations to achieve that goal, the adviser, Phil Hanser, told the Globe.
At that time, both chambers of the Minnesota Legislature and the governor’s office were controlled by Democrats. To succeed, any proposal would have required working across the aisle, Hanser said.
Hanser recalled Hegseth as a smart, likable student, eager to make change. He had conservative leanings and political aspirations, but his anti-woke warrior ethos was not discernible at Harvard, he said.
“I am a little surprised by the turn,” Hanser said. “There was nothing that suggested to me, this is going to be the next anti-DEI person.”
Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army National Guard, led two veterans organizations, Vets for Freedom, and Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative advocacy group.
After Harvard, he became a regular television presence and hosted “Fox & Friends Weekend,” and Trump nominated him as defense secretary despite limited leadership experience.
He was grilled by Democrats during his confirmation hearing — one of the most contentious for a defense secretary — about allegations of heavy drinking and sexual assault, which he called part of a smear campaign. He was eventually confirmed by Congress by a one-vote margin, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.
The 2013 Harvard paper reveals a measured Hegseth.
The paper is known as a policy analysis exercise, described at the Kennedy School as the capstone experience to the curriculum for a master’s in public policy. Unlike a traditional research paper, the applied thesis requires a student to engage with a client organization to solve a policy problem.
In Hegseth’s case, the client was the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota think tank where he was serving as a senior fellow. The center advocates for conservative and free-market ideas and traditional American values.
The topic of Hegseth’s thesis — how to secure political and financial backing for a selective Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics high school in Minnesota — emerged during a conversation with American Experiment founder Mitch Pearlstein.
Pearlstein, now retired, said in an interview with the Globe that he recognizes the dissonance between Hegseth’s Kennedy School paper and his recent comments to military leaders.
“Did I relish the speech? No,” Pearlstein said. “I am not a fan of the style of this administration. It’s far too harsh for my taste.”
Pearlstein hasn’t seen Hegseth in more than a decade but still considers him a friend.
He said he believes the defense secretary gave his honest perspective in writing his Harvard thesis, though he acknowledged that the moderate tone Hegseth struck in the paper might serve him better at Harvard than in the Trump administration.
“You don’t write a thesis by knocking the hell out of people,” Pearlstein said. “I view it as a straightforward analysis that he genuinely believed what he was saying. Did he contort himself to say that? I don’t think so.”
Hegseth, who made a short-lived Republican bid for Senate in Minnesota in 2012, emphasized in his thesis the need to work on a bipartisan basis. He presented Hortman, a well-known Democrat who had sponsored the first measure on STEM efforts, as key to making the school a reality.
Hegseth interviewed Hortman about her efforts to reform STEM education and found common ground. “Most importantly, Rep. Hortman emphasizes – quite correctly – that if a STEM school debate becomes a traditional education battle of left versus right, the idea will never come to fruition,” he wrote.
He pointed to potential challenges from both sides of the aisle, noting that teachers’ unions have traditionally opposed schools with selective admissions and that conservatives might be averse to expanding public education without reforms.
Ultimately, the school envisioned never did materialize.
“It was a good academic exercise,” Pearlstein said.
Hegseth has since disavowed his Harvard education, perhaps anticipating Trump’s war on his alma mater. In 2022, when he was a Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, he defaced his Harvard diploma on TV, writing “RETURN TO SENDER” across the front.
“Harvard was horrible,” Hegseth said in a 2024 podcast. “I got dumber.”
Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her @fernandesglobe. Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at Stephanie.Ebbert@globe.com.