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 is the education agenda changed from the first Trump administration to the second? Because

so much has changed. So for the 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.

Their perception was that their job was to come in, change some of the stuff that Obama had done that they didn't like, put some policies in place that can make incremental progress forward.

But they were coloring within the lines.

Even one of these officials who I talked to, who was an advisor in the first administration in the Ed Department, said that the things

that they were doing now in 2025 would have been unthinkable in 2017. For example.

So, for example, taking on a school like Harvard aggressively to say, we believe that you have violated

your federal contract with us. You've had this rampant

anti-Semitism. That's a violation of federal statute, but it's also a violation of your agreement

...