About 200 university presidents and chancellors signed onto a Tuesday letter denouncing the Trump administration's "coercive use of public research funding."

Why it matters: Dissent to President Trump's higher education threats is slowly growing.

What they're saying: "We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education," the university leaders said in their letter.

A day after Harvard sued the Trump administration over its decision to freeze billions in federal funds to the school, more than 180 higher education leaders from around the country released a joint statement on Tuesday condemning the administration’s efforts to control universities.

The government’s “political interference” and “overreach” is “now endangering higher education in America,” they wrote.

The Trump administration has gone to war with elite universities, even as it claims its latest missive was sent by mistake. Its approach, as in many other policy areas, has been to shoot first and ask questions later. Power seems to grow out of the barrel of a tweet, with punitive action favoured over due process and principle. This might achieve results in the short term, but cannot win a battle of ideas that by definition requires a consistent philosophical stance.

Imagine a country that invites the world’s best students to study there, only to deport them over a traffic violation.

That country could soon be America, as the Trump administration has begun revoking the legal status of foreign students. The government has provided little to no explanation for this measure, and some students have sued over allegedly illegitimate revocations due to minor or discharged offenses that don’t merit termination of their visas.

Some 5 million Americans with defaulted student loan payments will have their loans sent for collections on May 5, the Department of Education announced on Monday.

Next month, for the first time since student loan payments were paused due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Education Department will collect the debts from borrowers who had defaulted -- which means they hadn’t paid their debts for around nine months or 270 days -- before the pandemic.

Harvard University filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after it pulled over $2 billion in federal funding to the Ivy League institution over accusations the school is not doing enough to target antisemitism.

Harvard University announced Monday that it is suing the Trump administration in federal court, seeking to block a freeze on more than $2.2 billion in research grants.

The move follows Harvard's refusal to comply with a series of sweeping demands from the administration, which included limiting campus activism, altering admissions policies, and restructuring university governance. According to Harvard, the freeze came just hours after the university said it would not acquiesce to the government's orders.

Harvard University is suing President Donald Trump's administration for threatening to withhold federal funding if the school did not comply with its list of demands.

The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court, asks a judge to block the funding freeze from going into effect, arguing the move is "unlawful and beyond the government's authority."

In it, lawyers for the university argue that the administration is unlawfully using billions of dollars in federal funding as "leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard."

President Trump and Harvard University are at daggers drawn, and the battle promises to play out on the national stage for some time. Trump wants Harvard to change its ways, not only when it comes to the lax handling of disruptive demonstrations and antisemitic harassment, but also in the matter of the university’s pervasive leftist bias. Harvard, which seemed at least tentatively open to changes in its disciplinary practices, has drawn the line at the Trump administration’s insistence on monitoring and redressing its ideological imbalance.

President Donald Trump’s administration lashed back at Harvard University on Wednesday, with the Department of Homeland Security cutting over $2.7 million in grants and threatening to cancel all student visas, according to a press release obtained exclusively by The Free Press. The move comes two days after Harvard refused to agree to a series of demands by the administration, and Harvard’s president Alan Garber said that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”