Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Pete Hegseth, Princeton, and Me
Pete Hegseth, Princeton, and Me
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| 03/02/2025, 09:37 (há 1 dia) |  | ||
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Pete Hegseth, Princeton, and Me
Patrick Deneen reflects on his time at Princeton, particularly as senior thesis advisor to the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth - and its wider meaning.
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I began my academic career at Princeton University, where I held an appointment as assistant professor of Politics from 1997-2005. During much of my time at Princeton I felt like an outsider looking in - I was a graduate of nearby Rutgers University, which I had attended both as an undergraduate and a doctoral student. Due to a fluke of history, Rutgers is sometimes thought by many to be one of the Ivies when, in fact, its actual name should be “The University of New Jersey.” As such, I lacked the Ivy league imprimatur of most of my Princeton colleagues.
This discrepancy never bothered me, and I was grateful to have bucked the odds, but my background led to widely differing perspectives from those of my colleagues. I especially remember feeling utter incredulity over the university’s boasts that Princeton was a bastion of “diversity.” At that time, it was claimed, Princeton’s diversity was especially evident given the vast geographic range from which students were drawn, not only from every state in the Union, but a large number of foreign nations. Yet, as a professor in classrooms filled with students of nearly identical educational and experiential advantages as well as class backgrounds, albeit from a myriad of locations, it immediately struck me that there had been more actual diversity in one of my Rutgers undergraduate classes - in which almost every student was from New Jersey - than an average Princeton class. While students at Rutgers mostly hailed from nearby towns and cities such as Paramus, Vineland, Freehold, and Camden, they were not only racially and ethnically diverse, but diverse in life experience. Some of my classmates were well-prepared for college, the children of professors and pharmaceutical scientists; most were middle-class children of middle-tier professionals; and quite a few (at that time) were first-generation students whose parents were janitors, retail clerks, farmers, cops, and the like.
This was one of the many pervasive forms of disconnect that was readily evident to me at Princeton and places like it. I was already skeptical about progressive liberalism, which seemed a philosophy especially attractive to elites who simultaneously and loudly proclaimed their devotion to equality while enjoying a life that was anything but ordinary. Among my fellow political theory faculty I was not a devotee of liberalism in general, and loathed the philosophy of John Rawls in particular, which put me outside the philosophic and methodological approaches of most of my colleagues.
Around this same time, during academic year 2002-03, I came to know a Princeton student whom I discerned was also outside the Princeton mainstream - by a considerable margin. His name was Pete Hegseth, whom I knew of as a member of the Princeton basketball team and for having a somewhat notorious reputation as a conservative firebrand as editor of the conservative student paper The Princeton Tory. But it was as an ROTC student on a campus of students who would mostly go on to well-heeled jobs as investment bankers or consultants, or law school or medical school, that I recognized something of a fellow internal exile, albeit for different reasons. He was a Princeton man, but refused to go along with the expected liberal pieties of the typical Princeton student. He was that most unusual of students, a contrarian among the elites, and someone who chose the hard path rather than the way of wealth shrouded by a progressive veil. I saw something then that has left me unsurprised and even filled with considerable hope as I’ve watched his rise to prominence and power. He was then, as now, a contrarian within a system that was based on falsehood - and he dared to call it out.
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