Trump battles academia, but especially the Ivy League

WASHINGTON – There it was for all to see, President Donald Trump’s tangled relationship with the Ivy League, delivered in a burst at his rally in Michigan on the night of April 29.

“He’s the top,” the President said of Dr Mehmet Oz, the TV celebrity doctor he chose to oversee Medicare and Medicaid. “I mean, he went to Harvard.”

But then he added: “I shouldn’t even mention that to any more because that used to be a good thing. Today, it doesn’t mean much.”

There was this about General Mark Milley, the President’s first-term choice as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“You know, he went to Princeton,” Mr Trump said in 2019. “And he went to Columbia.”

But then: “I’m not sure, was that a good thing or a bad? Did I like it or not?”

The President never answered, although he called Gen Milley, whom he has since reviled, a “smart cookie”.

And on Justice Brett Kavanaugh: “He was, I believe, No. 1 at Yale,” Mr Trump said in 2018 of his Supreme Court nominee. “Is that a correct statement?” It was not, since Yale does not calculate class rank.

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 US$90,000 (S$116,800) or more a year, send a disproportionate number of graduates into America’s leadership class and accounted for less than 1 per cent of the nation’s undergraduate enrolment in fall 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 anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semitism, 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 harboured for a club that has never really accepted him.

“They don’t return the love to him,” said Mr 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.”

Mr Timothy 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 criticising 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”.

(Mr O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter and editor, faced a US$5 billion defamation lawsuit from Mr Trump after Mr O’Brien’s 2005 book – Trump Nation: The Art Of Being The Donald – put Mr Trump’s wealth at US$150 million to US$250 million rather than the billions of dollars claimed by the President. The case was dismissed in 2009.)

On May 2, Mr Trump renewed his recent threats to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, even though federal law prevents the President from ordering the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to conduct tax investigations. White House officials have said the IRS will make its own determination about Harvard.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, Harvard’s president,

Dr Alan Garber, said the university had “problems that we needed to address”

but added that the Trump administration’s oversight demands had “gone too far”.

Earlier in the week, it was Mr Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), that was in the cross hairs.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights ruled on April 28 that the school had violated Title IX by allowing a transgender swimmer to compete on the women’s team, and threatened referral to the Justice Department if Penn did not restore all honours to female athletes who had been “misappropriated by male athletes competing in female categories”.

The Trump administration had suspended US$175 million in federal funding to the university over the issue.

Penn officials have not commented.

Mr Trump’s relationship with his alma mater is complicated.

He has never delivered a commencement address there, although former president Joe Biden and Mrs Hillary Clinton have. Penn has also not awarded Mr Trump an honorary degree.

Mr Trump was admitted in 1966 as a transfer student from Fordham University in New York City to Penn’s undergraduate Wharton School, where he focused on studying real estate, the family business. Mr James Nolan, a close friend of the President’s older brother, interviewed him for admission.

“He answered my questions,” Mr Nolan, now 86, said in an interview. “He wasn’t particularly outgoing.”

Mr Nolan recalled that Mr Trump had a “high B average, maybe something of that sort” from Fordham, and that a more senior member of Penn’s admissions staff reviewed Mr Trump’s transcripts and made the decision to accept him.

“People think of how difficult it is to get into the Ivy League schools now,” Mr Nolan said. “But this was 1966. It wasn’t that difficult.’’

Mr Nolan remembered Mr Trump as something of a loner on campus. “He seemed to me to be rather isolated,” he said.

“I don’t recall seeing him with people. I do recall that he went home every weekend to New York to do some work with his dad.”

In the years since his 1968 graduation, Mr Trump has regularly cited his Penn degree as evidence of his intelligence.

“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said in 2015 in typical remarks in Phoenix.

“I’m, like, a really smart person.”

Mr Trump has also claimed that he was first in his class, although the programme from the 1968 Penn commencement does not list him among those students with academic honours. He has never made his grades public.

Mr Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said in testimony to Congress in 2019 that the President had instructed him to send threatening letters to his alma maters, warning of jail time for anyone who released his transcripts.

“I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) scores,” Mr Cohen told the House Oversight Committee.

Mr Marcus, Mr Trump’s former public relations man, recalled a conversation he once had with the President.

“He said to me, ‘You’re really smart. What’s your IQ?’ Well, who knows what your IQ is? So I made up a number, 190. And he said, ‘That’s pretty good. Mine’s higher.’”

Mr Trump has fewer Ivy Leaguers in his current Cabinet than at the start of his first term, and fewer than other recent presidents. But he does have them – five of 23, including himself.

Vice-President J.D. Vance, who has degrees from Yale Law School and Ohio State, has attacked elite academia as vigorously as Mr Trump, notably in a 2021 speech when he was running for Senate in Ohio.

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country,” he told the National Conservatism Conference, drawing applause.

He concluded with a rallying cry citing former president Richard Nixon: “He said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’”

And yet, Mr Trump highlighted the academic pedigrees of the Ivy Leaguers in his Cabinet in the announcements of their nominations, which is something he did not always do for those who attended less elite schools.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth got a shout-out for his degrees from Princeton and Harvard, for example.

But there was no mention of Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s degree from East Carolina University or Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s diploma from Haverford College.

There are some exceptions to Mr Trump’s view that an Ivy League diploma is a mark of intelligence.

Consider Mr John Bolton, one of his ousted first-term national security advisers and a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Mr Bolton wrote a book about his time working for Mr Trump that enraged the President, who retaliated early in 2025 by revoking Mr Bolton’s Secret Service protection, despite death threats that Mr Bolton faces from Iran.

Mr Bolton said his degrees never seemed to impress the President very much.

“He likes to insult me with how dumb I am,” said Mr Bolton, who pointed out that his 17-month tenure still makes him Mr Trump’s longest-serving national security adviser. NYTIMES