What is correct is that the president’s war on academia has focused intensely on the Ivy League, the richly endowed collection of eight schools, most founded in the colonial era, that cost $90,000 or more a year, send a disproportionate number of graduates into America’s leadership class and accounted for less than 1 percent of the nation’s undergraduate enrollment in the fall of 2022.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination. Officials in higher education acknowledge failures, but call the president’s crackdown a perilous threat to academic freedom.
The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.
“They don’t return the love to him,” said Alan Marcus, a business and political consultant who oversaw Mr. Trump’s public relations from 1994 to 2000. After the president’s companies went through multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s, Mr. Marcus said that as part of an attempted comeback for his client he tried to get Mr. Trump to deliver a college commencement address or receive an honorary degree.
“I called a few people I knew on boards,” Mr. Marcus said. “But I got essentially laughed at.”
Timothy L. O’Brien, a biographer of Mr. Trump, said the president’s ire about the upper echelon of academia was not surprising. “He has a long track record of criticizing elites that he desperately wants to be accepted by,” Mr. O’Brien said. As far as the Ivy League, he said, “he could barely wait to get in himself.”