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How Harvard president Alan Garber came to lead the higher ed resistance against Trump [1]
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Date: 2025-04-19
And yet, on Monday, when Harvard defied the federal government’s attempt to force the university into submission, Garber became the leading figure resisting a crackdown on institutions that President Trump sees as standing in the way of his ambitions.
A mild-mannered Midwesterner, he was a physician and a scientist before serving for more than a decade as a behind-the-scenes administrator at Harvard. He became Harvard’s president practically by accident, thrust into the role after the sudden resignation of Claudine Gay in January of last year.
CAMBRIDGE — To say Alan Garber is an unlikely figure to lead the resistance is an understatement.
“I think it’s the most important thing that has happened so far this year to try to arrest Trump’s illegality,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who has sought to rally his party’s opposition to the president’s expansive agenda.
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The question of which path Harvard would take — defiance or acquiescence — had hung over Harvard Yard for at least a month before Garber and the university took their stand.
In March, many at Harvard looked on in horror as Columbia University’s leaders acquiesced to an extraordinary list of government demands, which seemed only to provoke further threats.
Meanwhile, a handful of elite university presidents, notably Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton, had forcefully spoken out against the Trump administration. Garber, though, had remained largely silent, even in the face of open letters and protests urging him to push back. He also took steps that some saw as attempts to placate the Trump administration.
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It seemed clear, though, that Harvard could be the next target.
After Columbia’s capitulation, former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow visited Garber in his office in Massachusetts Hall, a 300-year-old red-brick building in Harvard Yard.
Garber said he knew Harvard was going to have to fight, Bacow recalled. The question was, when was the right time to do it, he recalled Garber saying.
“It was very clear we weren’t going the Columbia route,” Bacow said in an interview this past week.
For many at Harvard, that was not always so obvious.
When the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force announced a review of billions of dollars in research funding for Harvard and affiliated hospitals on March 31, Garber’s public response made some on campus nervous.
He issued an open letter that was titled “Our Resolve.” But within it he promised to “engage with members of the federal government’s task force to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism.”
Edward Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor and director of undergraduate studies, is a Garber admirer. But, “being perfectly honest,” he said, “when he sent his message out a few weeks ago I was, like, ‘Wow, he’s not pushing back.’”
To Garber’s critics, the message was on brand.
Here was a man who had not forcefully spoken out against Trump’s broadsides against universities during the presidential campaign. Instead, Garber had slowly reshaped Harvard to make it more agreeable to the president, critics contend.
Garber adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, which barred many university leaders, including himself, from taking positions on controversial issues of the day. He enforced protest rules that supporters said maintained order on campus but that critics said were designed to censor pro-Palestinian activism, a subject that has drawn the ire of the Trump administration.
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Then, the day after Trump’s inauguration, Harvard adopted a definition of antisemitism favored by the Trump administration.
“All one could note from Garber’s behavior was essentially that he was willing to accept the substance of many of the concerns by Republicans and the Trump administration,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a visiting scholar at Harvard who is on sabbatical from Princeton University.
Harvard declined to make Garber available for an interview.
In the two weeks after the funding review was announced, Garber and members of Harvard’s governing boards deliberated over how to respond. Some wondered whether an acceptable agreement could be reached; others believed negotiation was futile.
Garber’s first message had left open the possibility of dialogue. “We fully embrace the important goal of combatting antisemitism,” he wrote in that March 31 letter. He has said antisemitism is a problem at Harvard and that he himself has experienced it, even as president.
Then, a few days later, the government sent a list of demands. They were vague, many at Harvard observed, and some had little or nothing to do with antisemitism. The letter, delivered on Thursday, April 3, ordered Harvard to cut diversity programs and change hiring procedures to eliminate any racial preferences.
They also instructed the university to “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security at a time when federal agents were arresting international students on city streets.
In response, Harvard merely confirmed it had received the letter.
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Then, silence.
During the week that followed, students, professors, and the mayor of Cambridge urged Harvard’s leaders, including Garber, to push back.
A poster noting a protest against the Trump administration was taped to a pole outside the gates at Harvard University in Cambridge on April 15. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Did the pressure sway him? Bacow says no.
“The thing that is not clear to many people was that Harvard would be in a much stronger position to respond once the government stated clearly what they were demanding,” he said. “Once that message came through Friday night, Alan responded.”
That follow-up message from the Trump administration, delivered on the night of April 11, conveyed demands that some legal observers said were so expansive and intrusive they effectively would have placed Harvard into federal receivership.
Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Harvard would have had to submit numerous academic divisions, including the Medical School, the Divinity School, and the School of Public Health, to outside oversight.
It would have been obligated to turn over all data on admissions and hiring so the government could scrutinize it for any preferences on the basis of race or sex, which would have been banned under the agreement.
Harvard would have to submit to an audit assessing the “viewpoint diversity” of its faculty, student body, staff, and leadership. Then the university would have been obligated to implement reforms to boost diversity of viewpoints, which the letter did not define, in every division and department. Viewpoint diversity generally refers to a mix of ideological and political persuasions.
All of these measures, and others, would have remained in place “at least until the end of 2028.”
The demands were so extreme they shut down any possibility of negotiation, many Harvard insiders said.
When Garber and Harvard responded midday Monday, April 14, there was no longer any mention of engaging with the task force, no intimation an agreement might be reached.
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Instead, in an open letter, Garber affirmed Harvard’s commitment to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, free speech, and combatting antisemitism.
But, he wrote, “These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law.”
“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 said.
Harvard’s outside lawyers sent a separate letter that challenged the constitutionality of the administration’s demands, which many legal observers read as an implicit threat to sue.
To Bacow, this was precisely the kind of response Garber had been aiming for. “He was patient,” Bacow said. “It was a much stronger message given that he could say, ‘Look at what they’re asking for.’”
“The government’s demands spoke for themselves,” Bacow said. “They were an attempt to seize control of the institution.”
Alan Garber addressed the crowd during the 373rd commencement at Harvard University in Cambridge on May 23, 2024. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff
On Friday night, The New York Times reported the administration’s antisemitism task force had sent the April 11 letter by mistake, although a White House official stood by its demands. “The task force, and the entire Trump administration, is in lockstep on ensuring that entities who receive taxpayer dollars are following all civil rights laws,” Madison Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, said on behalf of the task force on Saturday.
Garber’s message on Monday was the kind of text — a carefully argued, eloquently written defense of science and academic freedom — that resonates with a Harvard audience.
It was a “shot in the arm for morale” on campus, Hall, the philosophy professor, said. “One of my students put it brilliantly: It was like being told, ’We ride at dawn.’”
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The Trump administration hit back hard. It froze more than $2 billion of research funding within hours of Harvard’s response. Since then Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll foreign students. On Friday, the Department of Education demanded extensive records about the school’s contracts and donations from foreign sources.
Kenneth Marcus, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office during the first Trump administration, said it is “not a good look” for Garber and Harvard to defy the government on an issue as explosive as antisemitism.
“We are now in a crisis situation seeing levels of antisemitism that we haven’t seen in generations. The federal government is now responding with a whole of government approach, which is unlike what we had seen in the past,” said Marcus, whose organization, the Louis D. Brandeis Center, sued Harvard last year for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students.
“To the extent that the government is using extraordinary remedies this is both welcome and necessary.”
Meanwhile, other university leaders seemed to have rallied after Harvard’s defiance. Late Monday night, Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, signaled for the first time that her university might draw a red line in its negotiations with the Trump administration.
Some issues, she wrote in a campus-wide message, including “how specifically to address viewpoint diversity issues, are not subject to negotiation.”
The next morning, Eisgruber, the Princeton president whose institution is facing its own federal funding cuts, wrote on social media: “Princeton stands with Harvard.”
In the days since, the faculty senates of Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and other institutions urged their leaders to join a “Mutual Defense Compact” of universities banding together to resist Trump’s pressure campaign.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Harvard’s stand resonated beyond the confines of the academy. Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor, said one of his students told him that online sales of merchandise at The Harvard Shop shot up after Garber’s message.
During a Bright Eyes concert at the House of Blues in Boston Friday night, front Conor Oberst shouted from the stage: “F*** yeah, Harvard, I love you!”
Another former Harvard president, Larry Summers, said he’s been thinking of Harry Truman this past week as he considers Garber’s situation. Now a professor at the university, Summers has known and admired Garber for 50 years and, on occasion, criticized him.
Summers notes Truman was, like Garber, unexpectedly thrust into leadership at a pivotal moment: with the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Truman guided the country through the end of the Second World War and then oversaw the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan.
Garber is “a kind of Harry Truman of the academic world,” Summers said. “He and others didn’t expect such awesome responsibility to land on him. ... He is stepping up to huge responsibility with grace, character, strength, and skill.”
Senator Murphy, in an interview Friday, said he had watched with alarm in recent weeks as private institutions — law firms, corporations, universities — folded under pressure from Trump.
“It felt like we were entering a really dire moment where nobody, where no institution in this country might be willing to stand up to him,” Murphy said.
Trump told corporations “to jump...and they said how high. He told law firms to sign a loyalty pledge and they said, ‘What do you want?’ He went to Harvard and said, ‘Cut a deal with me and stop giving me such a hard time.’ and they said, ‘See you in court.”
“It may go down as a very important moment,” Murphy said.
In his characteristic way, Garber, 69, himself has dropped a few understated quips that offer insight into Harvard’s situation — and his own. Ever the analytical academic, the former provost at the university has said, “An excessive aversion to risk is a risk itself.”
His induction ceremony as Harvard president also spoke to the circumstances in several ways: It was conducted practically in secret in December, nearly a year after he began leading the school, and just after Trump had been elected and was already laying plans for his crackdown on universities.
Of his occupying the Holyoke Chair, a 450-year-old ceremonial wooden seat for Harvard’s president, Garber observed that it was not “as uncomfortable as I expected it to be. But it was surprisingly warm when I sat on it during commencement.”
“It seems to be growing hotter by the day.”
Mike Damiano can be reached at
[email protected].
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