(Bloomberg) — Universities on both sides of the Atlantic were under intense pressure to deal with campus conflict over political issues long before the Trump administration started cracking down on higher education. In the past three years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, prompted by a Hamas attack, have led to student protests around the world and put university administrators in the uncomfortable position of having to take political positions – or try their best not to.  “These days, there is hardly a crisis that doesn’t hit the campus with unbridled force,” said Ulrich Rüdiger, rector of RWTH Aachen, one of Germany’s top research universities. In countries like Switzerland and Germany, universities have generally tried to stay neutral, which has in turn raised questions about whether that’s a realistic goal, and what such neutrality might be in service of.  At the beginning of March, ETH Zurich received a questionnaire from the Trump administration asking whether a research project that receives US funding was in line with new government policies on diversity, equity …