WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Miller turns to May Mailman.

Mailman, 37, a Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.

Her hand in deploying these levers of power was evident from the beginning of Trump’s second term. As his ambitions around reshaping higher education expanded, so did her remit. She is credited as an animating force behind a strategy that has intimidated independent institutions and undercut years of m

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