Harvard president battles Trump but agrees campus culture needs change

WASHINGTON - Dr Alan Garber, president of Harvard University, disagrees with US President Donald 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 non-profit 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 last 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 anti-Semitism 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.

In April, Trump officials said they would cut more than US$2 billion (S$2.59 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 May 2, 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. “We have so many challenges ahead, and we also have so many opportunities.”

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.

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 in April 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 that he shares some of the same concerns about Harvard that 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.

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.

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.

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 anti-Semitism and weighs in on public controversies.

Dr Garber has called anti-Semitism a “serious problem” at Harvard. He recently rolled back policies related to diversity and race, ending university support of graduation celebrations for various student groups, including black, Latino and LGBTQ+ students.

“The last few years have been a wake-up call,” said Professor 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 recognising what many other academic leaders have not: The Trump administration had not made “an unreasonable request” when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish anti-Semitic harassment.

A change of plans

In 2011, Harvard 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.

Repeatedly, she asked him to be provost. He relented after he inquired about the job and heard something that appealed to him: It would focus on helping others succeed.

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 Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, people who have worked with Dr Garber at Harvard said 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 Mr 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.”

After more than a dozen years as provost, Dr Garber had decided it was time to return to teaching. A new president, Professor Claudine Gay, took over in 2023. Dr Garber hoped to leave administrative work by the end of 2023.

But within months, Prof Gay was forced out over her handling of accusations of anti-Semitism 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.

On Aug 2, 2024, the Harvard Corporation made Dr Garber the president through the 2026 to 2027 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.

After the Trump administration said in March that it was reviewing US$9 billion in grants and contracts because Harvard had not done enough to stop anti-Semitism on campus, Dr Garber’s response was hardly a manifesto of Mr 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 anti-Semitism.

But the administration’s next sally shocked him. It came in the form of an e-mail that arrived 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 e-mail, Dr Garber added, “they had gone too far”.

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 doctoral 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 anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on campus, apologised for both issues and promised more changes.

He has also gone beyond the focus on anti-Semitism, taking on the issue of race and diversity.

In April, 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”.

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 endgame, Dr Garber said his goal was not specific to Harvard.

It is, he said, “to ensure that universities in the US can contribute to the nation in the ways we’ve always intended to”. NYTIMES