Harvard says it will give back coronavirus funds after Trump asked them to. Here's a look at past tiffs between the president and the university.

At a briefing at the White House this week, Trump demanded that Harvard return the millions in coronavirus relief funds it had accepted.

"I want Harvard to pay the money back, OK?" Trump said. "If they won't do that, then we will do something else.

"They have to pay it back, I don't like it. This is meant for workers — this isn't meant for one of the richest institutions," he said.

Harvard was the subject of some jabs in a March briefing, in which Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro said "of course, you know the Harvard joke: You can tell a Harvard man, you just can't tell him much. Right?"

Trump replied, "They can't tell them much."

The Trump administration went up against Harvard in 2018, supporting a group of Asian Americans who were suing the university over its affirmative action admissions policy.

The Justice Department accused Harvard of "engaging in outright racial balancing" by limiting admissions for academically-qualified Asian Americans.

Drew Faust, who was president of Harvard at the start of Trump's term, was pointed in her criticism of the president.

"This administration seems unpredictable in many ways," Faust said in 2017 at a Bloomberg News event, according to The Harvard Crimson.

"It doesn't seem tied to the traditional notions of the role of government," she said. "And so [the new administration's] understanding of this long relationship between federal government and higher education is unclear to us."

Many Harvard professors have been outspoken in their criticism of Trump.

In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that a top Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe, shared a conspiracy theory about Trump sharing Russian money for an FBI letter.

Tribe said of the story that "key details have been corroborated and none, to my knowledge, have been refuted. If true, it's huge."

Harvard Law professor John Coates said last year that one of Trump's tweets repeating a statement that his impeachment could cause a "Civil War like" fracture in the United States was impeachable in itself.

"This tweet is itself an independent basis for impeachment - a sitting president threatening civil war if Congress exercises its constitutionally authorized power," Coates said, according to a report by The Hill.