What's right is that the Academic President's War is concentrated in the Ivy League. The Ivy League is a rich donated collection of eight most established schools during the colonial era, costing over $90,000 a year, disproportionately sending alumni to the American leadership class, accounting for less than 1% of 2022 enrollees.
Trump's attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania — captivated him with his political foundations. He has threatened to withhold or withhold billions of dollars of federal funds from six of the eight schools. Because they are fortresses of anti-Semitism and liberal indoctrination. Higher education officials have admitted failure, but they have called the president's crackdown a dangerous threat to academic freedom.
The Trump administration has targeted many other universities and universities due to potential anti-Semitism. Still, eight Ivies are a cultural touchstone for Trump. Beyond politics, there is a complex brew of res and respect that the president, an Ivy League alumnus, has long embraced for a club that never really embraced him.
Alan Marcus, a business and political consultant who oversaw Trump's public relations from 1994 to 2000, said that after the president's company went through multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s, Marcus attempted to deliver the university nurse's address to Trump as part of an attempt to comeback for his clients.
“I called a few people I knew on the board,” Marcus said. “But I essentially laughed.”
Trump's biographer Timothy L. O'Brien said the president's rage about the academia's upper class was not surprising. “He has a long track record of criticizing elites who he desperately wants to be accepted,” O'Brien said. As for the Ivy League, “He barely could have waited to get into himself,” he said.
