Last month, one of Donald Trump’s most trusted aides laid out a playbook for a no-holds-barred assault on America’s elite universities. The president has been following it to the letter since.
“We’re going to bankrupt these universities,” Leo Terrell, head of the newly created federal task force to combat antisemitism, told Fox News. “We’re going to take away every single federal dollar.”
If they did not play ball, he warned, they should “lawyer up, because the federal government is coming after you”.
This was not hyperbole. Since entering the White House, Trump has launched an attack on US universities that has few parallels in the history of the federal government’s interactions with the higher education sector.
The latest salvo in the war came this week when Trump moved to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. On Wednesday evening, American media reported that he had commanded the Internal Revenue Service to initiate the step.
The White House referred questions about Harvard’s tax status to the IRS, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s casus belli is the claim that college authorities — not just at Harvard, but at dozens of other seats of learning — failed to protect Jewish students from harassment during widespread campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, in the wake of Hamas’s terror attack on October 7 2023.
The weapon of choice is the withholding of federal funds to force institutions to not only enact more robust policies on combating antisemitism but also change their hiring and admissions policies and ensure “viewpoint diversity” — a code word for forcing a tilt to the right politically.
Scott Schneider, an education lawyer based in Austin, Texas, said the Trump administration’s moves over the past few weeks marked the first time federal authorities had pulled funds from universities without even the appearance of due process.
“This is without precedent in the 60-70 years that the government has provided funding to higher education in this country,” he said. “What’s being done is remarkably coercive.”
For Trump, himself a graduate of the elite University of Pennsylvania, the campaign is central to his political project — a front in the culture war he has unleashed on some of America’s most hallowed liberal institutions.
The crackdown has the clear imprimatur of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, who is driving much of the president’s domestic agenda.
“This is foundational for conservatives,” said one Republican strategist. “For decades the conservative movement, and Miller as its disciple, have railed against college campuses as training grounds for the radical left. This is their chance to do something about it.”
Miller’s contempt for “wokeness” stretches back decades. While a student at Duke University, another elite institution, he lambasted its “leftist” bias, claiming Democrats outweighed Republicans in the faculty “by a staggering ratio of more than six to one”.
“Conservative students frequently feel they have to make the cruel choice between being open about their beliefs and getting a fair shot at an A,” he wrote in the college newspaper in 2005.
In 2021 he founded America First Legal, which has filed lawsuits against what it calls “woke corporations”, including institutions of higher education, over hiring and admissions policies it alleges are discriminatory.
Such views are shared by another top figure in the Trump administration, vice-president JD Vance, a graduate of the elite Yale law school, who has slammed universities for disseminating “ridiculous ideas” such as critical race theory in US society.
“The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth — they pursue deceit and lies, and it’s time to be honest about that fact,” he said in an oft-quoted 2021 speech.
That approach is now common currency in the Republican party and has provided a handy intellectual justification for the current stand-off with Ivy League colleges. Even Harvard alumni such as Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York, are supporting the drive.
“It is time to totally cut off US taxpayer funding to this institution that has failed to live up to its founding motto Veritas,” she said. “Defund Harvard.”
The first target in the Trump administration’s crusade was New York’s Columbia University, whose leadership gave in to White House demands for an overhaul of governance and student discipline after it suspended $400mn in federal funding.
However, the money has not been restored. “It showed there’s no point in acceding to the demands of a bully, because he’ll just make more demands,” said Michael Thaddeus, vice-president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “This is not an enforcement action — it’s a political vendetta.”
Instead, government officials doubled down with more aggressive demands for government oversight over Columbia.
It also turned its ire on Harvard, with Terrell’s task force demanding it implement “merit-based” hiring and admissions policies and commission an external party to audit its student body, faculty and staff “for viewpoint diversity”.
Harvard on Monday defied the government’s demands, saying it would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”. The White House responded by freezing more than $2.2bn in federal funding for the university and threatening to abolish its tax-exempt status.
Following Wednesday’s reports that the IRS was moving to make good on Trump’s threat, Harvard late on Wednesday called any such attempt “unlawful”.
It said such a move would “endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission”, and result in “diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programmes, and lost opportunities for innovation”.
Staff members said the Harvard leadership had no option but to stand up to the White House. “The demands were Maoist in nature,” said Ryan Enos, a political scientist at the university’s school of government. “It was so wildly out of sync with the American tradition that it’s not surprising the leadership refused.”
Others see the Trump team’s accusation of antisemitism as a way to cement support for the Republican party among Jews.
“I’m Jewish and I never bought into the argument that the campus protests were a unique threat, but they created an opening for Maga to pull Jewish voters to the Republican side for good,” said Michael Hirschorn, a Harvard graduate, producer and writer. “They are exploiting [the] trauma [of October 7] in an incredibly cynical fashion.”
If the confrontation lands in court, experts say Harvard has a good case. Even some conservatives say the demand for viewpoint diversity could violate the free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
“Anything that reaches into the classroom is going to be very hard for the government to sustain,” said Adam Kissel, an education expert at the rightwing Heritage Foundation. “It becomes very challenging to address [any individual utterance] without violating the First Amendment.”
But others say that even if the White House fails in court, it will have succeeded in its main objective — cutting America’s Ivy League universities down to size and weakening their almost magical hold over the country’s imagination.
“I have to wonder if an implicit motive here is to undermine the privileged status that elite institutions of higher education have held in our minds,” said Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think-tank, who has a PhD from Columbia.
Polls have shown a slow deterioration in public confidence in universities over the past few years, she said. “So the political moment is ripe for them to be able to turn public sentiment.”
