Fighting talk Harvard hits back at Trump over bid to control academia

Donald Trump attended the first Ultimate Fighting Championship event of his new presidency last Saturday, revelling off stage in a standing ovation from MAGA supporters and on stage in the barely controlled violence of a sport he has long adored.

- Ed Pilkington

The previous day he instigated his own UFC bout, picking a fight with one of the US's most formidable opponents: Harvard. It is not only the world's richest university, with a $53bn (£40bn) endowment that is bigger than the GDP of nearly 100 countries, it is also the oldest in the US.

It was founded in 1636, which makes it 140 years older than the United States itself. Round one to Harvard!

The way the US president picked this fight, though, suggests that he was itching to start it even against such heavyweight competition.

The five-page screed that the Trump administration sent to Alan Garber, Harvard's president, made demands that would have been virtually impossible for any academic leader to accept.

They included federal government oversight of admissions and an end to recruitment of international students "hostile to American values" - whatever that meant.

Most egregiously, the administration insisted on imposing "viewpoint diversity", essentially ideological control, over faculty appointments.

Harvard, which previously made conciliatory gestures in the face of Trump's accusations of campus antisemitism, finally stepped into the ring on Monday.

In a message titled The Promise of American Higher Education, Garber bluntly rejected the demands and stated that Harvard would "not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights".

Let the fight begin! The might of the federal government is now pitted against the intellectual and institutional might of the US's most revered university.

There is much riding on the outcome. Harvard has already been punished with a freeze on $2.3bn of federal funds this week, and Trump is threatening to terminate the full $9bn in US government subsidies and remove its tax exempt status.

Those would be savage blows, even with such a hefty endowment.