President Trump has described the nation’s elite universities as anti-American, called campus leaders “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and choked off schools from billions of dollars to force their submission to his political agenda.
Now, those aggressive tactics are complicating his effort to usher in large-scale change across academia.
This week, several of the nation’s elite universities refused to support a “compact” that would link their support for the administration’s strict definition of gender, proposed caps on international students and other policy changes to enhanced access to federal research funding.