Presidential threats. Onerous investigations. Extensive funding cuts.

The Trump administration has wielded all three against Harvard University in what began as the work of a task force the president commissioned to address antisemitism on campus — but has sprawled into a multifaceted pressure campaign that leverages the scope and power of the federal government.

The effort involves at least eight investigations spanning at least six agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services. Some of those agencies, and others, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, have pulled or frozen grants from the school and its research partners, totaling nearly $4 billion.

The administration targeted Harvard — and other elite schools, such as Columbia University — as part of a broader political and legal strategy to reshape academia’s race-based admissions policies and perceived liberal bias. While not being officially framed as a personal vendetta for President Trump, the government’s increasingly punitive actions have come after Harvard resisted many of the changes his administration demanded to admissions, curriculum and hiring practices.

So far, the moves have not convinced the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to come back to the negotiating table, even if school officials have privately expressed concerns about the lasting damage that feuding with the administration could cause.

The university sued after the administration threatened to take away billions in federal funding and has pushed back strongly against the various investigations, denying allegations of wrongdoing and maintaining that it is committed to following the law.

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government,” Harvard’s president, Dr. Alan Garber, wrote last month. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”