Donald Trump vs. the Ivy League: An Election-Year Battle

“The president believes these failures have gone unchecked for far too long and only gotten progressively worse at the expense of the next generation.”

Mr. Trump’s criticism of elite universities follows

in a Republican tradition that dates back at least to President Richard Nixon. Mr. Nixon, who was offered a scholarship to Harvard but stayed closer to home to attend Whittier College in California, accused elite universities of fostering anti-Americanism among their professors and students.

“Richard Nixon made a concerted effort to penalize institutions of higher learning, especially the elite institutions he considered to be tolerant of the antiwar movement,” said Timothy Naftali, director of the undergraduate public policy major at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.

“He instructed the Office of Management and Budget to find a way to cut federal funding to those schools. He focused on M.I.T., but he didn’t like the Ivies, and he wasn’t happy with the University of California.”

But the difference, Mr. Naftali said, was that Mr. Nixon’s own appointees and good-government Republicans stepped in and stopped him. “Nixon believed in government; Trump doesn’t,” Mr. Naftali said.

For most of his presidency, Mr. Trump — who has often bragged of his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School — did not focus as much on education as on more signature issues like curbing immigration or cutting federal regulations. But he has taken on education issues when they fit with his broader agenda.

For example, the president’s antagonism toward China has spilled over into the academic world, with many college presidents fearing an exodus of Chinese students, who often pay full, nonresident tuition.