Barack Obama is hardly Donald Trump’s biggest fan (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

Since that speech, the education department has frozen a whopping $2.3 billion in federal funds to Harvard University after the famed college rejected a list of demands set out by the Trump administration.

The White House say the demands, which were sent to Harvard in a letter last week, were designed to fight antisemitism on campus – with changes to hiring, admissions and teaching on the agenda.

Essentially, the educational institution would cede a large amount of control to the government if it had agreed to Trump’s demands, which included points such as ensuring the university will ‘make organizational changes to ensure full transparency and cooperation with all federal regulators’ and urging the school to ‘immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies’.

Harvard rejected the proposal on Monday (April 14), claiming the White House is trying to take ‘control’ of the college and the wider community.

“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard,” Harvard president Alan Garber said.

The former president wrote on Twitter: “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”

In response to Havard’s rejection, the Department of Education said: “Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges.”

Elsewhere in the letter, the Trump administration called for reforms on ‘merit-based’ admissions and hiring policies, as well as a ban on face masks, which appeared to be aimed at pro-Palestinian protesters on campus.

Harvard has said it is taking measures to tackle antisemitism on campus, but that this wouldn’t be achieved through ‘assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate’.