Dr. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, disagrees with President Trump about many things. He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its nonprofit tax status.
But Dr. Garber agrees with Mr. Trump on one point. In one of the rare interviews he has given since Harvard began its battle with the federal government, Dr. Garber said this week that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing.
Harvard has often shut out voices that many liberals disagree with, he said, and it has allowed antisemitism to go unchecked.
“The issue for me was not principally whether we had problems that we needed to address,” Dr. Garber said in a lengthy interview in Washington.
The problem is the Trump administration’s methods, which are growing more aggressive by the day. Last month, Trump officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funds intended for the university, to force it to comply with a series of demands Harvard says violate the First Amendment. On Friday, Mr. Trump escalated the attack, saying the Internal Revenue Service would take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status, threatening many millions more.
To Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not a provincial matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II.
“This is genuinely unprecedented,” Dr. Garber said in the interview.
“We have so many challenges ahead and we also have so many opportunities,” he said, adding, “this is a time when we should be doubling down on our investments in research, particularly in science.”
An Unlikely Resistance Leader
Dr. Garber earned three degrees from Harvard before moving to California to study to become a medical doctor at Stanford University. He was there for a quarter-century, studying health policy, raising four children and serving as a physician at the nearby Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
He never planned to be a college administrator, or to leave California.
Now Dr. Garber is Harvard’s president during an unprecedented crisis. And some Democrats, frustrated and forlorn at a lack of leadership in their own ranks, have embraced him as a hero. They celebrated when Dr. Garber penned an aggressive rebuttal to an intrusive list of Trump administration demands last month and then sued the administration.
In a recent message to the Harvard community, Dr. Garber vowed to keep fighting federal intrusion.
But all along, Dr. Garber has been clear — subtly but insistently — that he shares some of the same concerns about Harvard the Trump administration has.
“We still have much work to do,” he has written.
The White House has said Harvard should not receive federal money if Jewish students are targeted and harassed on its campus. “The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families, is coming to an end,” a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said last month.
In the eyes of Mr. Trump and many Republicans, Harvard and other elite American universities have become echo chambers — places where students develop intolerance for political perspectives different from their own and shield themselves from ideas they find objectionable.
University leaders often say that criticism exaggerates the issue, claiming that critics want to perpetuate “woke” caricatures of university culture in order to win elections.
But at the same time, many university leaders also worry that Americans have lost trust in academia and no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. About a third of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup poll published last year, up from 10 percent a decade earlier.
Some of Dr. Garber’s most notable decisions during the 16 months he has led the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university have focused on shifting that culture. Under his leadership, Harvard changed how it handles student discipline, manages protests, hires faculty members, challenges antisemitism and weighs in on public controversies.
Dr. Garber has called antisemitism a “serious problem” at Harvard. “It is present on our campus,” he said in March and added that, as a Jew, he had experienced it himself.
In recent days, he also rolled back policies related to diversity and race, for example, ending university support of graduations for various student groups, including Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. students.
“The last few years have been a wake-up call,” said Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who has warned that his university and other elite institutions have devalued intellectual and ideological diversity at considerable cost to their reputations.
He praised Dr. Garber for recognizing what many other academic leaders have not — at least in public: The Trump administration had not made “an unreasonable request” when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish antisemitic harassment.
“He’s got principles and courage, to say something about an issue that had not been adequately confronted before,” Dr. Pinker said.
As he has moved to make more changes, he has also faced pushback. Harvard students, writing in an essay in the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, suggested the changes to diversity programs “might be politically expedient for now.”
“But it will not solve Harvard’s public relations crisis,” they went on, adding, “The way to win against authoritarian attacks isn’t by prioritizing optics — it’s by standing up for our values.”
Fixing Broken Systems
As a health care economist, Dr. Garber focused on some of the American health care system’s most stubborn problems, publishing 129 papers in 25 years.
His questions were probing. And he was unbothered by delivering answers people might not like.
Why does the federal government allow companies to charge what they want for drugs discovered and developed with research paid for by the federal government?
Why can’t we know what our medical bill will be before it arrives? It’s like going to a restaurant and getting a menu without prices, he said.
A fast runner, Dr. Garber trained for and raced in marathons. Once, he spent hours recovering from an injury by running in a pool, listening to “War and Peace” for entertainment. Four months later, he ran a marathon with a time of 3 hours 36 minutes.
In 2011, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, wanted Dr. Garber to be her new provost, the university’s chief academic officer. She had seen him interact on a medical school committee and was impressed by his ability to retain a quiet equanimity and bring about consensus. It was a trait that would serve him well, colleagues said, as the person responsible for interacting with Harvard deans, department heads and professors on a daily basis.
“He had a calm, ethical voice,” Dr. Faust said in an interview.
Repeatedly, she asked him to be provost. Repeatedly, he said no. He relented after he inquired about the job and heard something that appealed to him: It would focus on helping others succeed.
“It’s like this lightbulb went off, and I thought, you know, I’m at a stage in my career where I get much more pleasure out of seeing the people I mentor succeed than me getting another honor or paper accepted,” he said.
He discovered he really liked the job. “You’re deeply embedded in the academic life of the university, ” Dr. Garber said. “And I love that.”
Twelve and a half years passed by, periods of political and social upheaval that transformed higher education, including a Black Lives Matter movement that brought new attention to diversity on campus and a fight over affirmative action that took Harvard to the Supreme Court.
Even before the protests over the war in Gaza, people who have worked with Dr. Garber at Harvard said that he had expressed disappointment with a political climate on campus that could be intolerant of dissent.
“I think that troubled him a lot, actually,” said Robert E. Rubin, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a former long-serving member of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s powerful governing body. “Because he felt that universities should be a place for exchanging all views, as opposed to a place where people exclude certain views. And I happen to agree with that.”
Mr. Rubin recalled one conversation in which Dr. Garber stressed the importance of ideological diversity in higher education. “He said he believed that one of the problems we faced was a conformity of views, and the tendency on the part of some people to suppress contrary views,” Mr. Rubin said.
The Presidency in a Time of War
After over a dozen years as provost, Dr. Garber had decided it was time to return to teaching. A new president, Claudine Gay, took over in 2023. Dr. Garber hoped to leave administrative work by the end of the year.
But within months, Dr. Gay was forced out over her handling of accusations of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. Dr. Garber had to change his plans.
“The provost is basically a partner to the president, and I probably knew about as much about the job as a person could know without being president,” he said in the interview.
He thought he would stay only until Harvard found a permanent president and would then take a sabbatical. But the list of problems confronting him was long, and growing.
He wanted to clarify rules around protests, and when the university should make public statements, for example. Harvard did not often speak out on issues beyond the campus, “but the policy had not been consistently followed,” he explained. Yet, he added, “we were getting demands from groups in every direction to make statements.”
Prominent faculty members and alumni were also concerned that Harvard had become a “national joke,” as Dr. Pinker, the psychology professor, put it.
The number of early admissions applicants to Harvard had plummeted.
Donors were skittish and angry, and vocal about their frustration with the university.
And one influential free speech advocacy organization ranked Harvard last in its annual survey of 200 institutions.
That spring, Harvard began unraveling policies that Dr. Garber and others believed had fueled some of its political problems. It adopted a policy stating that the university would not issue official statements about issues that did not affect its core functions. Its largest academic division said it would no longer require job applicants to attest in writing their commitment to diversity.
Summer came, and students went home. The tent city that pro-Palestinian students had erected in the Harvard Yard came down after Dr. Garber helped bring about a peaceful end to weeks of student demonstrations.
But many in academia worried that protests would strike up again in the fall. And the list of changes that Dr. Garber wanted to see through was still quite long.
“At some point, all of us in leadership and the corporation decided that this was a lot for an interim president to do,” Dr. Garber said.
On Aug. 2, 2024, the Harvard corporation made Dr. Garber the president through the 2026-27 academic year.
Trump Strikes
During Mr. Trump’s first term as president, education had often seemed like an afterthought. Soon after he returned to office in January, it became clear his second term would be focused on bringing academia to heel.
Initially, Dr. Garber tried not to antagonize the new president.
After the Trump administration said in March that it was reviewing $9 billion in grants and contracts because Harvard had not done enough to stop antisemitism on campus, Dr. Garber’s response was hardly a manifesto of Trump resistance.
He noted in a message to the Harvard community the steps the university was taking to address the administration’s concerns. He also vowed to cooperate with the federal task force on antisemitism.
On campus, many were pushing him to be more aggressive, and not to negotiate.
He was doing no such thing, he said in the interview. He had simply offered to explain all that Harvard had been doing already, and what else it had planned.
But the administration’s next sally shocked him. It came in the form of an email that arrived late on April 11. It had a list of demands, including allowing the federal government to review hiring decisions, examine admissions decisions and audit the student body, the faculty and the staff to be sure they represented a variety of viewpoints.
Three days later, Harvard published a scathing letter written by Dr. Garber. “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,” he wrote.
With that Friday night letter, Dr. Garber added, “they had gone too far.”
“We don’t question appropriate regulation,” he said in the interview. But this appeared to violate the Constitution.
Saving the University
Since that moment, Dr. Garber has been hailed as a defender of academic independence. He has led Harvard in a lawsuit that claims the Trump administration has no legal authority to demand such sweeping changes to the way the university operates.
Not everyone sees his resistance as heroic.
“What this celebration has missed,” two Harvard Ph.D. students wrote in an article for The Nation, “is that Harvard has been quietly complying with Trump’s agenda for weeks.”
In recent days, Dr. Garber released a report outlining problems with both antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus, apologized for both issues and promised more changes.
He has also gone beyond the focus on antisemitism, taking on the hotly contested issue of race and diversity.
Three years ago, Harvard fought all the way to the Supreme Court to maintain an admissions system that considered students’ racial backgrounds, arguing that admitting students of different backgrounds and experiences was essential to providing a well-rounded education.
Last month, Dr. Garber wrote in a public message that Harvard was “adopting important adjustments to the ways we build community,” suggesting that the university “focus on individuals and their unique characteristics rather than their race.”
In a speech, Caleb Thompson, Harvard’s undergraduate student body president, criticized the university’s decision to eliminate graduation celebrations for affinity groups.
“To the Garber administration for the decision that was made to shut down affinity graduations and attack affinity spaces here on campus, my message is this: ‘This was not what you promised when you said you would stand up against the Trump administration,’” Mr. Thompson said.
Dr. Garber’s defenders say he is making moves to preserve the integrity of the university. “He really is doing this as the servant leader,” Dr. Faust said. “This is not about Alan’s greater glory.”
Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, said that he believed Dr. Garber understood the high stakes involved — not just for Harvard but for all of American higher education.
“I believe he is aware of the moment in time,” he said. “He is aware of what needs to be done. He is aware of his important role in getting those things done. He has a huge fraction of the community behind him.”
Dr. Garber’s approach — trying to reform the university while protecting it from attack — is not without risk.
But as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on Harvard, many on campus seem to have looked past their differences, more united than they have been in years as they face the threat outside their gates.
Asked about the end game, Dr. Garber said his goal was not specific to Harvard. It is, he said, “to ensure that universities in the U.S. can contribute to the nation in the ways we’ve always intended to.”
Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people.
Jeremy W. Peters is a Times reporter who covers debates over free expression and how they impact higher education and other vital American institutions.
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