How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The swiftness and the severity with which the Trump administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many people. not least to university presidents and faculties from Harvard to UCLA.

But for conservatives, this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. Staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the administration and in the larger conservative movement about why they decided to wage this battle and how they mapped it out for Trump's return to power. Trump versus Harvard, if we can boil it down to that, is nothing less than a conservative campaign to change the way private and state colleges operate. Emma Green's reporting appears in The New Yorker this week.

Emma, how has the education agenda changed from the first Trump administration to the second? Because so much has changed. So for this story, I spent a lot of time talking to both administration officials who work for the president now, but also people who were in that first Trump administration. And the thing that all of them have said is that they wish they had gone farther.

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