Yale student veterans learn how to bridge the military and the university.
James, or Jimmy, Hatch ’24 laughed when a Yale professor suggested he apply to Yale as an undergraduate student. Despite his nearly twenty-six years in the U.S. Navy and multiple deployments as a SEAL, he couldn’t believe that Yale would be interested in what he had to say. Hatch had dropped out of high school with a GPA in the “high 1s” to join the military. After visiting Yale to give a talk and tour the campus, he wrote and submitted his application, including its two essays, in under an hour. He had low expectations. Yet, in 2019, Hatch matriculated at Yale as a 52-year-old first-year.
Arriving on campus, he was unsure how the community would welcome him.
“I thought I was a monster because I’d been doing what I was doing, I was really good at it, I enjoyed it, and I felt like it was what I should be doing. I was paid to be a criminal,” Hatch said. “I was concerned that people here wouldn’t see the value of that, and in fact, that they would be freaked out by me, but that wasn’t the case.”
Hatch spent four years as a Navy sailor and twenty-two years in the SEAL Teams, during which he served as a parachute instructor and had combat deployments to Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He received four Bronze Stars throughout his service, awarded for heroism in combat. In 2009, on a mission to rescue a captured soldier, Hatch was shot in the leg, resulting in injuries that required eighteen surgeries and ended his military career. Hatch was awarded a Purple Heart. Post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and a suicide attempt marked his rehabilitation process.
Ten years after his injury, Hatch became the first non-traditional student in Yale’s Directed Studies program for first-years, and he went on to major in humanities. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 2024, he served as a resource to incoming Directed Studies students, calling himself the “old man with arm tattoos who hands out fliers before the lectures from time to time.” This spring, Hatch became a lecturer for the Jackson School of Global Affairs, teaching a course called “The Impact of War on Its (Willing and Unwilling) Participants.”
To better understand the veteran community at Yale, I talked to fifteen U.S. military service members from five branches of the armed forces—one active duty sniper, a professor who served in the army, and thirteen student veterans in the Eli Whitney Students Program. Founded in 2008, the Eli Whitney program offers adults without bachelor’s degrees who are more than five years out of high school the opportunity to enroll in Yale undergraduate classes full or part-time. The program has doubled in size over the past five years, with twenty-six Eli Whitney students matriculating in 2024, seventeen of them veterans. Yale College is now home to approximately fifty enrolled student veterans.
At a moment when elite universities have come under fire from the right for being anti-American, the student veterans who come to Yale grapple with bridging two worlds: the military, and the university.
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When veterans enter the higher education market without experience or guidance, they can underestimate their academic potential, which can lead to a phenomenon known as “undermatching.”
Risa Sodi, an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Yale’s Director of Advising and Special Programs, said that the admissions office’s greatest challenge with student veterans is urging them to apply to competitive universities. “Sometimes people select themselves out—they just think, I’ll never get into Yale, so I won’t bother applying,” Sodi said.
Yale professor Dr. Michael Fotos, who is a founding faculty volunteer with the Warrior-Scholar Project and chairs their Board of Directors, said that veterans’ humility and “gravitas” make them some of the strongest students.
Nearly all of Yale’s Eli Whitney student veterans benefited from specialized programs like Service to School and the Warrior-Scholar Project, which help prepare veterans for college with workshops and counseling. Yale was the first undergraduate college to partner with Service to School.
Brandon Choo ’26, a junior and active duty Marine who most recently served as a Scout Sniper Instructor, enrolled at Yale through the selective Marine Corps Enlisted Commissioning and Education Program. MECEP allows enlisted Marines to become officers while attending a Naval ROTC-affiliated college. “I never really thought of an Ivy League school as a legitimate option for me. It was always kind of like a lofty, faraway place, where the smart people go,” Choo said. “I’m very grateful to all the people who helped me get here.”
Starting in the 2022-2023 academic year, Yale began meeting 100 percent of Eli Whitney students’ demonstrated financial need. Yale also participates in the Yellow Ribbon Program, meaning the university works with the Department of Veterans Affairs to cover some or all college costs not covered by the post-9/11 G.I. Bill, a federal program that subsidizes certain tuition costs for veterans and their families.
Among student veterans, the question of whether they felt prepared for their Yale education is complicated. For some veterans, parts of their military experience mirrored Yale’s academic rigor. A significant portion of Eli Whitney student veterans worked in intelligence, including several students who served as linguists.
According to Robin Dudley ’27, a former Air Force Airborne Cryptologic Language Analyst in Mandarin Chinese, her training at the Defense Language Institute was so rigorous that she feels she can now conquer any academic challenge. For Dudley, the Yale undergraduate experience is “a piece of cake in comparison.”
Choo, on the other hand, said that the military and Yale are both demanding but in different ways. “I thought I knew how to manage time very well before I came to Yale, and then I came here, where you have to plan your day down to the nearest thirty minutes every single day for four academic years,” Choo said. “That’s its own type of discipline, but I don’t know if I’d be successful at it had I not had my military experience.”
Niels Newlin ’27 said that Yale’s demands for creative and critical analysis were an adjustment. He served for six years as an Army combat medic, deploying to South Korea during his service, and he grew accustomed to strictly regimented work; in the military, “you’re signing yourself up to not think and just do,” he said, and that extends to your sense of agency in what can be extremely important foreign policy decisions that you’re carrying out.
Patrick McGrath ’26, a Coast Guard veteran, incoming president of the Yale Undergraduate Veterans Society, and current economics major, primarily worked in counter-narcotics operations, participating in high-risk drug busts and seizures in international waters. In high school, McGrath struggled academically and graduated with few options. He called the academic intensity of Yale far outside his comfort zone and “hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life, by an enormous margin,” but he also enjoys the freedom to budget his own time.
Hatch said he “never got stressed out about exams or grades, or let that control my life. I did study hard, but I didn’t get ridiculous. Nobody was shooting at me, you know what I mean?”
There are similarities between being in a special missions unit and being at Yale, Hatch said; both have rigorous vetting processes and high expectations for their members.
“Yale is in the business of building humans, at least in the undergraduate world. I watched it happen when I was a student: it would take a couple of classes for these kids to understand exactly what the professor needed, and then they’d just start cranking it out,” Hatch said. “Watching that drive, even in a form that seemed decidedly different than the drive I’d needed in my previous life, I could recognize that it was the same drive.”
For Hatch, going from close quarters combat to reading canonical writers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau theorize about the original state of mankind was emotionally jarring. He cried in a professor’s office because of how the reading made him reflect on his military experience.
“I showed up here with some fucking baggage, so to me, I was like, how can any of these people really know what the fuck is going on if they haven’t been in that environment? In war?” Hatch said.
Hatch never wants to embarrass professors, because he knows they all genuinely want the best for their students. He has spoken privately with professors after class when they have made incorrect statements about the nature of modern warfare.
“I had a professor say, ‘This kind of combat that happens in The Iliad doesn’t happen anymore—people don’t even see each other, it’s all done by drones.’ And I had to say, ‘That’s not true,’” Hatch said. “The night I got shot, I was ten feet from the guy who shot me. I looked in his eyes. We see each other all the time, you just don’t hear about it.”
Perhaps the most important thing that service members contribute to campus is their perspective on the enormity of the suffering that occurs as a result of war. John Tesmer ’27, who served as a Russian Linguist in the Air Force, says he has never met a group of people more anti-war than some of the veterans with whom he’s spent time.
“That’s probably the realization of having seen it—you just realize how horrific it is,” Tesmer said. “My personal belief is that war should be avoided at all costs. I don’t think I would have believed that at 18 or 19, before going through experiences that gave me an appreciation for death and destruction at scale.”
Unlike most Eli Whitney students, most Yale undergraduates weren’t even born when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, and most started elementary school nearly a decade after the beginning of the War on Terror.
“I do believe there’s a bubble here, of ‘everything’s gonna be okay,’” Hatch said. “I also believe that pacifism is great until people want to take your shit and kill your family. I think that’s one of the most difficult things for me to translate here at Yale—it’s hard for me to convey the reality of the threats out there to our country.”
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Yale and the military have been closely intertwined for hundreds of years, evidenced by the names etched in the Schwarzman Center Rotunda and the veteran memorial in Hewitt Quadrangle. In past decades, however, Yale’s relationship with the military has been rockier. In the early 1970s, Reserve Officer Training Corps programs withdrew from Yale following failed negotiations to keep the programs on campus in the wake of student protests during the Vietnam War, declining enrollment in ROTC programs, and the University’s decision to stop granting academic credit for ROTC-mandated courses.
Yale and peer institutions received backlash to their ban on the ROTC program. Even after the ROTC ban was reversed in 2011, journalist Nathan Harden ’09 criticized Yale for its “steady loss of patriotic ethos over the last forty years,” citing the ROTC ban and the “rabid Vietnam-era anti-military sentiment of the radical Left” as factors that caused Yale’s un-American turn.
In the week after his election to the presidency in 2024, Donald Trump released a video statement in which he vowed to fire “radical Left” accreditors that have allowed colleges to be dominated by “Marxists, maniacs and lunatics,” calling academics at Ivy League schools “obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth.”
The idea of a student veteran studying at Yale contradicts this image. Associate Director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy Michael Brenes consistently teaches veteran students in the program, which examines large-scale, long-term strategy in issues of political and social change as well as statecraft. Brenes considers the caricature of the Ivy League university as radically anti-America and anti-military reductive.
Coming into Yale after serving for twenty years, former U.S. Army Ranger and Intelligence Analyst Tristan Benz ’27, a Global Affairs major, has encountered this perceived divide between Yale and the military among his friends. “Some of them look at Yale in a certain political kind of light, and they might assume that I wouldn’t fit in, instead of looking at everything that Yale actually is,” Benz said. “They’re looking at it from a certain perspective that they gather from some media.”
David Allison, an Army veteran, Yale lecturer, and fellow with the Nuclear Security Program, said the people who believe Yale is a bastion of radicalism and criticism of American values have likely never experienced Yale campus life.
“When I think about my soldiers, the soldiers who served under me, I don’t imagine them coming to one of my courses and saying, ‘You’re so different than you were in the military,’” Allison said. “And I’m not getting complaints from undergrads saying, ‘You’re a vicious warmonger.’ There is a lot more overlap than we might anticipate.”
For the vast majority of the 20th century, the U.S. government was almost entirely made up of people who both had military experience and had been through higher education. According to the Pew Research Center, between 1965 and 1975, at least 70 percent of Congresspeople had experience in the military–largely due to conscription during World War II and the Korean War. Comparatively, that percentage has hovered around 20 percent in the past decade.
“There’s a disconnect between who’s actually fighting the wars and who’s planning the wars,” said Tesmer. “And the people that are planning the wars by and large come from top 25 schools.”
It can be frustrating to observe the separation between the reality of combat zones and the bureaucracy that makes consequential military decisions, especially in the Pentagon, said Paul Lomax ’27, who served in Naval Special Operations and was deployed twice to Afghanistan.
“These are people that aren’t on the front lines, and they’re making the big-time, big-picture decisions in DC. They’re focused on the logistical aspects, and they’re also politicians,” Lomax said. He criticized the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as evidence of this disjuncture. “They were just so disconnected with what was going on on the ground halfway across the world, and a lot of incorrect decisions were made.”
According to Brenes, Yale has a responsibility to give students a human picture of conflict, even if they will never see it up close.
“You will never fully be able to understand what it’s like to be a service member if you’ve never been in that role, but that doesn’t mean that you’re prohibited from studying it or trying to understand it,” Brenes said.
Sometimes that separation is good, Lomax said, and it can allow leaders to make nuanced decisions on consequential issues. However, for other student veterans, it’s essential for traditional students to graduate from Yale with some level of personal connection to the human cost of war.
Thomas Ghio ’26, the outgoing president of the Yale Undergraduate Veterans Society, served in the Air Force as a Tactical Air Control Party, meaning he coordinated airstrikes from the ground.
“A lot of people that come to Yale or schools like Yale become leaders in all kinds of different areas of life, and by having student veterans on campus, it allows them to be exposed to that perspective and and take that with them as they continue their journey and hopefully make a better world for all of us,” Ghio said.
Yale might be the first place that Yalies get to have a real conversation with a veteran, Brenes pointed out.
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The landscape of U.S. foreign policy has changed drastically since Hatch first joined the military, to when the U.S. began the War on Terror, to now. Since the end of the Iraq War and the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s no longer accurate to assume that any given veteran has deployed overseas or experienced combat. New service members may join the military for education or career opportunities, just as others join due to a sense of duty or patriotism.
Many of the veterans I spoke to mentioned that they had braced themselves for stereotypes about the military at Yale, but they were pleasantly surprised by how students and professors treated them on campus. In fact, multiple students told me their veteran status afforded them higher respect from professors.
Hatch said that the visibility of his military service—in the form of a cane, tattoos covering both arms, and occasionally his service dog—can lend more gravity to his presence on campus.
“There’s a currency to combat and violence,” Hatch said. “If I hadn’t been involved in the Special Operations world, if I hadn’t served the way that I did, and done the amount of combat deployments that I did, what would make me stand out?”
Hatch’s new class involves reading, discussing, and writing about various literary texts and primary sources that shine light on the experiences of those impacted by war, from civilians to military leaders to soldiers. When the class first began, it struck Hatch that his students had never met anyone like him—someone who had seen war up close.
The class has hosted several speakers, including a professor from Ukraine and a professor who fled Afghanistan with her child after operating an all-girls’ school in her neighborhood. Veteran and U.S. Senator Mark Kelly and General Scott Miller are slated to visit the class soon. Facilitating this diversity of perspective is, to Hatch, an act of patriotism.
“If I’m helping you guys, even if you fucking hate the military and disagree with me, if I’m helping you guys, I’m helping our country,” Hatch said. “I truly believe that.”
Hatch has been finding the new class to be a challenging and humbling experience, and the seminar has become a very tight-knit community. He’s cried reading some of the papers in his class, and he’s been deeply moved by the openness and audacity of some of his students to confront unspoken tensions.
When he looks around at the faces of his students, he worries that they are taking on the weight of the world. While facilitating seminars, he remains vigilant in choosing his words carefully, because, as he said, his job now is “giving these kids ammunition for the fight that they have ahead of them, when they are introduced to this thing called war.”
-Dani Klein is a first-year in Benjamin Franklin College.
Photos courtesy of Gavin Guerrette.
