President Trump’s administration has taken its fight with the Ivy Leagues to new heights, detaining student activists, launching investigations, pulling hundreds of millions in funding and giving even some conservatives pause.
Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University and others are all feeling the heat over their alleged inaction over campus antisemitism and policies around transgender athletes.
Trump’s tactic to halt federal funding has been called illegal by opponents, though he had long pledged to go after what he called “woke” colleges. The administration has also attacked schools not in the Ivy League — particularly the University of Maine after a public spat with the state’s governor — but the elite conference of eight private schools is clearly a prime target.
“He’s not going after every highly selective, well-resourced institution. He’s going after highly selective, well-resourced institutions that happen to be in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and New York. These are in blue states. They’re name-brand institutions that a lot of Americans recognize. They are institutions that the president has spent two years trying to stereotype and caricature as being out of touch with American values,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council of Education.
The yanked funding began at Columbia, which has capitulated to the demands from the Trump administration to change some of its policies but has not yet gotten back its $400 million in federal contracts.
The University of Pennsylvania lost almost $200 million for alleged infractions regarding transgender athletes on women’s sports teams, although the university argues its policies now match those of the NCAA, which has banned transgender athletes from women’s sports.
And Harvard, the nation’s oldest and richest school, is under its own threat of funding loss. The Trump administration said it is reviewing billions of dollars in contracts and gave the school a list of policies it wants changed, accusing the university of failing to protect its students from antisemitism in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests.
The investigations have forgone standard protocol, with a lack of transparency or remedial period. In a normal discrimination probe at a school or university, the institution is typically notified of a complaint and gets a hearing to make its case. Schools also get a period of time to fix the issue before funding is cut off, with the entire process taking months or even years.
But when Princeton University announced last week that the Trump administration had suddenly suspended multiple research grants, it said the “full rationale for this action is not yet clear.”
“I think the administration believes this is politically winning among their supporters to attack these institutions,” Fansmith said. “These are elite institutions and blue states. A lot of his supporters are probably sympathetic to the attacks, not because there’s any merit to them, but just because they may have some hostility towards those institutions based on everything the president’s been saying.”
The crusade brings mixed feelings for some conservatives who say they understand the frustrations against schools but see the degradation of norms around probes and punitive action as a concern.
“Institutions deserve to be investigated. I think sanctions in many cases are wholly appropriate,” said Rick Hess, senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “But I think there’s clear, fully established category processes for mounting the investigation.”
“I also think that it’s appropriate to be very explicit about which sources of funding are in question in a specific rationale. I think it would be enormously helpful and crucial in terms of the precedent to pursue these things through a more ordered process, and to do it with more documentation and transparency as the process unfolds,” Hess added.
Conservatives were already using the post-Oct. 7 campus demonstrations and accusations of antisemitism as a wedge against top-tier universities.
In the aftermath of the 2023 Hamas attack, Republicans brought three elite college presidents — two of them from the Ivy League — in front of a House panel to talk about antisemitism on campus, with all three at the time refusing to say calls for genocide against Jewish people would definitively violate their policies.
The president of Penn resigned soon after, and the head of Harvard left her position a month later.
Trump railed against institutions of higher education on the campaign trail, describing them as “woke” and vowing to crack down on them from the White House.
“One of the rationales for paving this way is that the higher ed community has shown zero interest in engaging conservative concerns in a more traditional form,” Hess said. “There’s a sense that it’s only under duress that they’ve shown any willingness to address behavior.”
Opinions of higher education among conservatives have dropped considerably in recent years, with Gallup finding in 2024 that only 20 percent of Republicans had confidence in the institutions, compared to 56 percent in 2015.
“If you looked on average at how professors at the Ivy League voted, there would be a majority [Democratic] … and so there’s this perception on the right that these colleges don’t have what they view as sort of a valid viewpoint,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson found 80 percent of the university’s faculty identified as liberal, while only 1 percent said they were conservative. The rest were either “very liberal” or moderate, with none identifying as “very conservative.”
“There are very real perceptions on the right that many of these institutions should fail and should potentially [be] rebuild, or just want them to fail and let other institutions rise up that have more conservative voices included,” said Meyer. “I don’t think that is the overwhelming perspective among anybody who has a right political ideology, but certainly it’s a loud vocal minority within the party that is driving a lot of these attacks on higher education.”
Harvard and Columbia have also been at the forefront of Trump’s immigration crackdown on international students who participated in the pro-Palestinian protests, but those efforts have been far more widespread, touching on schools across the country.
The funding fights, by contrast, have so far been reserved for an unlucky few.
The American Federation of Teachers and American Association of University Professors are suing over the financial hit to Columbia, and other groups are mounting legal challenges to Trump’s education moves more broadly, but for now, schools are having to make tough financial decisions.
Harvard has implemented a hiring freeze, and Princeton is reportedly considering selling more than $300 million in taxable bonds.
In the fight against antisemitism, Fansmith said, “This is this is not a case where the government and institutions should be on opposite sides.”
“Institutions want to do the right thing. The federal government has a responsibility to ensure that they are doing that, and we have really effective processes for doing that,” he said.
“It just so happens this administration, certainly in the cases of Columbia and Harvard and Princeton and Brown, is just ignoring that. They’re doing it not because they want a resolution, not because they want to solve problems. They’re clearly not interested in solving problems. They’re interested in making spectacle of it because they think it’s politically beneficial.”
