In its campaign to pressure elite US colleges to make a wide range of policy changes, the administration of President Donald Trump has come down hardest on Harvard University.

Decades-long suspicion of elite universities has evolved under President Trump into a full-scale war – punctuated this week by curbs on the flow of international students to Harvard.

Since its initial criticism of Harvard as a place where antisemitism was condoned or ignored during last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, the government’s list of complaints about the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university has grown by the day.