Harvard v Trump is latest front in right's war on academia

The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life last week, but the battle represents just the latest step in a decades-long war waged by the right on American academia.

- Adam Gabbatt

It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reag2an, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the right scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.

Trump reacted furiously last week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.

But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.

“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors. “They’re attempting to undermine and destabilise and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy.”