War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s presentation yesterday at Quantico, discussing the changes the military is making to its warfighting capabilities, procurement  and other things, was something to see. But among the items Hegseth discussed was something which particularly caught our eye – namely, that LSU is heading up a new initiative to develop military officer talent the War Department is seeking…

New Officer Training Pipeline

Hegseth also announced “America’s Corps of Cadets,” a new program involving five universities: Louisiana State University, Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University and Hillsdale College.

The program is intended to create an additional pipeline for recruiting and developing future military officers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Hegseth said the initiative would embed military discipline and leadership development at the participating schools. The five schools were selected as the initial participants, with no Ivy League universities included.

The War Department said the initiative is intended to strengthen the military’s officer pipeline by creating new partnerships with institutions of higher education.

The five schools chosen to headline the training of America’s Corps of Cadets are conspicuous, and LSU’s having been chosen as one of them gives confirmation of something we’ve seen coming.

Two of the five, Liberty and Hillsdale, are known far and wide as the most overtly conservative institutions of higher education in America. Tuskegee was founded by Booker T. Washington, who is more or less the patron saint of black conservatism, and Tuskegee’s reputation is that it’s probably the closest thing to a black conservative university that you’ll find.

Mississippi State has generally been known as the more conservative of the two (three, if you count Southern Miss) big universities in Mississippi.

And then there is LSU.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking Hegseth isn’t doing everything he can to ideologize the military. He is explicitly doing that. It’s wholly defensible that he is, especially after it’s been discovered that the Chinese Communist Party bought up a large swath of the military’s officer corps and the Obama/Biden years produced armed services more interested in social experimentation than warfighting. You could argue that what Hegseth is doing – he’s been accused of a purge – is de-ideologization rather than the opposite, but it’s hard to deny that having a conservative military is highly preferable to the alternative.

In any event, it’s clear that Hegseth is doing what he can to pipe conservative warriors through to the armed forces and embedding them there. God bless him for that.

One of LSU’s nicknames is The Ole War Skule, so on one level it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the War Department looking to partner with the university. LSU has a profound military tradition and history, though it isn’t worn on the sleeve in the same way as, say, Texas A&M does it. LSU’s course offerings include a military science curriculum which regularly pumps officers into the armed services as is. So it’s not earthshaking to see LSU on this list.

But Hillsdale and Liberty aren’t particularly known as military schools. Neither is Mississippi State.

Is LSU a conservative school? Does that explain the inclusion in the America’s Corps of Cadets pilot list?

Perhaps so. And if so, it represents a significant change in a very short time.

Remember, this is a university which was governed by F. King Alexander, one of the wokest, far-left university presidents ever to grace the leadership of a red-state flagship university. That was one of the worst foibles of Bobby Jindal’s tenure as the state’s governor, and Alexander’s antics and rotten stewardship did a lot to damage LSU’s standing not so much among the higher education crowd but parents of Louisiana children evaluating college choices.

And then John Bel Edwards replaced Alexander with Bill Tate, who’d come up as a DEI hire at several other universities and who had made his bones as an academic by writing  scholarly articles about how math was racist. Tate exceeded the expectations of some with his time on LSU’s campus, but the university nevertheless underwent a woke explosion while he was running it.

But then, Gov. Jeff Landry installed Dr. Wade Rousse in the president’s chair, and the ideological direction at LSU has palpably shifted.

It’s known that Landry asked the higher-ups at Hillsdale for advice on who to hire, and Rousse was their recommendation. His time at McNeese State earned him the reputation of being a vastly different kind of university leader than most. For example, Rousse established a think tank for researching the natural gas industry at McNeese State. That makes sense, of course, with Lake Charles being an international hub for liquefying and exporting natural gas, and billions of dollars being spent to establish LNG terminals all along the coastline of Cameron and Calcasieu Parishes.

But a modern American university embracing the processing and trade of fossil fuels? That’s virtually unheard of.

And since Rousse got to LSU, the word trickling out of the university is that the most aggressive leftist professors are leaving, the university is cooling on its attempts to purge the Greek system off its campus (which is a barometer for its wokeness), Rousse is bringing back standardized testing as a key tenet of its admissions process after more than a decade of “holistic admissions” which amounted to little more than a DEI system – and LSU had 31,000 applicants for 8,000 undergraduate spots this year as a result…

There are lots of indications that LSU is stepping away from its recent woke past. Hegseth’s announcement could be a sign people are noticing.