Can Alan Garber Save Harvard?

The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.

When he finally found a willing contact, he was drawn into aimless exchanges. He received no demands. No deadlines. Just a long conversation about the prospect of scheduling a conversation.

Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.

In the spring, Garber had watched Donald Trump take aim at Columbia, where anti-Israel demonstrations the previous year had so overwhelmed the campus that the university canceled the school’s graduation ceremony and asked the New York Police Department to clear encampments. In early March, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal funding to the school and said that it would consider restoring the money only if Columbia agreed to dramatic reforms, including placing its Middle East–studies department under an auditor’s supervision.

Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. turned his alma mater, Yale, into a bête noire, the American right has dreamed of shattering the left’s hegemony on campus, which it sees as the primary theater for radical experiments in social engineering. Now the Trump administration was using troubling incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry as a pretext to strip Ivy League adversaries of power and prestige.

The administration’s demands of Columbia impinged on academic freedom. But from Harvard’s parochial vantage point, they were also oddly clarifying. Whatever had gone wrong in Cambridge—and Garber’s own university faced a crisis of anti-Jewish bias—it hadn’t metastasized like it had in Morningside Heights. Harvard had disciplined protesters, and Garber himself had denounced the ostracism of Jewish students. Whichever punishment the administration had in mind, surely it would fall short of the hammer dropped on Columbia.

Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem

That was Garber’s frame of mind when the late-night ultimatum arrived: Submit to demands even more draconian than those imposed on Columbia, or risk forfeiting nearly $9 billion in government funding. Even for Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, $9 billion represented real money. The email ordered the university to review faculty scholarship for plagiarism and to allow an audit of its “viewpoint diversity.” It instructed Harvard to reduce “the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” No detail, no nuance—just blunt demands. To the Trump administration, it was as if Harvard were a rogue regime that needed to be brought to heel.

Trump’s team was threatening to unravel a partnership between state and academe, cultivated over generations, that bankrolled Harvard’s research, its training of scientists and physicians, its contributions to national security and global health. Federal funds made up 11 percent of the university’s operating budget—a shortfall that the school couldn’t cover for long. Stripped of federal cash, Harvard would have to shed staff, abandon projects, and shut down labs.

Yet the message also offered a kind of relief. It spared Garber from the temptation of trying to placate Trump—as Columbia had sought to do, to humiliating effect. The 13 members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, agreed unanimously: The only choice was to punch back. The university’s lawyers—one of whom, William Burck, also represented Trump-family business interests—wrote, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Soon after Harvard released its response, absurdity ensued. The Trump administration’s letter had been signed by three people, one of whom told Harvard he didn’t know the letter had been sent. The message, Garber realized, may have been sent prematurely. Or it may have been a draft, an expression of the White House’s raw disdain, not the vetted, polished version it intended to send.

But the administration never disavowed the letter. And over the next three months, the president and his team would keep escalating.

On Memorial Day, I met Alan Garber at his home, a 10-minute walk from Harvard Yard. One of the perks of leading Harvard is the right to reside in Elmwood, an imposing Georgian mansion that befits a prince of the American establishment. But Garber had declined the upgrade, choosing instead to remain in the more modest home provided to the university’s provost. When he took the president’s job last year at 69, after 12 years as provost, he agreed to a three-year term; he didn’t want to uproot his life.

I was surprised he found time to talk. It wasn’t just a national holiday—it was the start of the most stressful week on a university president’s calendar. Graduation loomed on Thursday, with all its ceremonial burdens: the speechifying, the glad-handing, the presence of the school’s biggest donors.

Garber led me into his living room, undid his tie, and slouched into a chair. A health-care economist who also trained as a physician, he carries himself with a calm that borders on clinical. Even an admirer such as Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, describes Garber as “meek in the way he sounds.” He is the opposite of bombastic: methodical, a careful listener, temperamentally inclined to compromise. But after Harvard’s feisty reply to the administration, Garber found himself cast a mascot of the anti-Trump resistance.

This was surprising, because in his 18 months as president, Garber has positioned himself as an institutionalist and an opponent of illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university, including those concentrated in the divinity and public-health schools, the hot centers of extremism after October 7, 2023.

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As provost, Garber rarely voiced his concerns about the emerging zeitgeist. And the lesson of Larry Summers—the Harvard president overthrown in 2006, in part for his criticisms of the campus left—suggested that challenging the prevailing politics might doom a career, or become an unhappy headline. So instead of acting on his convictions, he largely kept them to himself. He played the part of loyal deputy, helping presidents—Drew Faust, Lawrence Bacow, and then the hapless Claudine Gay—execute their chosen policies, which included robustly defending affirmative action and expanding the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. In 2019, when university administrators modestly defied progressive orthodoxy by denying tenure to an ethnic-studies professor, they sparked a sit-in and a controversy covered in the national press.

During Garber’s time as provost, he told me, he developed a nagging sense that the campus was losing its capacity for difficult political conversation. As the social movements of the day—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—took root, he grew alarmed at the tendency of students to demonize ideological opponents. Self-censorship was shutting down debates over race and identity even before they began. “The people arriving at Harvard as first-year students over time found it more and more difficult to speak about controversial issues,” he said. Israel was a subject that seemed to buck that trend, because it elicited such noisy displays of passion. But those paroxysms of anger frequently entailed calls for boycotting intellectual enemies and the social exclusion of contrary voices—adding to the broader problem of closed-mindedness on campus.

Garber’s first major appointment as president signaled a symbolic break. He elevated law-school dean John F. Manning, a former clerk to Antonin Scalia and one of the few prominent conservative voices at Harvard, to the position of provost. Manning’s rise represented more than token inclusion: Garber has quietly begun exploring a broader initiative to expand conservative representation among tenured faculty, in an effort to cultivate a more pluralistic ethos on campus.

Even as Harvard sits on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks from the right, Garber has turned inward—willing to engage with Harvard’s harshest critics and to admit that even bad-faith attacks sometimes land on uncomfortable truths. He’s treated the university’s crisis as an opportunity, leveraging the looming threat of Trump to make changes that would have been politically impossible in less ominous times. The leader of Harvard, bane of MAGA, agrees with much of the underlying substance of the MAGA critique of higher education, at least when stripped of its rhetorical froth and fury. He knows that elite higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, one that is, in no small measure, of its own making, because it gives fodder to those who caricature it as arrogant and privileged.

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On June 20, Donald Trump used Truth Social to declare his willingness to strike a deal with Harvard—an opening that any devoted institutionalist would have no choice but to seize, however narrow the path to an acceptable deal. Now Garber is gambling that he can reconcile two immense and opposing burdens, each tugging at his conscience: the imperative to protect the enormous research engine that sustains Harvard’s excellence, and the obligation to preserve academic freedom in its fullest form.

Despite his technocratic impulses and his centrist temperament, Garber has been drawn into a struggle for power, forced to make choices that will shape not just Harvard’s future but that of all the venerable, if flawed, institutions that Trump is targeting.

Garber was never meant to be one of the most consequential presidents in Harvard’s history. In fact, he wasn’t meant to be president at all. When the university began its search to replace Lawrence Bacow, in 2022, Garber indicated that he didn’t want to be considered. He was ready to disappear from university leadership.

Anyway, an aging white man didn’t fit the brief. Harvard was preparing to defend itself in the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the university would argue the legality and necessity of affirmative action on behalf of American higher education. It was a last stand for race-conscious admissions, likely a doomed one given the composition of the Court, and Harvard was eager to telegraph its commitment to diversity. When the Corporation chose Gay in December 2022 to become Harvard’s first Black president, Garber intended to stay on just long enough to ease the transition.

Then came October 7. While Hamas militants were still killing families and abducting civilians from Israeli kibbutzim, a group called the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement blaming the “Israeli regime entirely” for the murder of Israelis. Thirty-three student organizations—including the campus chapter of Amnesty International and the Harvard Islamic Society—co-signed a declaration that didn’t just blame Israel; it appeared to rationalize slaughter. The statement was posted before Israel had launched its war in Gaza, and it was swiftly and ferociously denounced—especially by Jewish groups, but also by lawmakers—as evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism at the university.

On October 8, Garber visited Harvard Hillel with Gay. For Garber, this wasn’t just a supportive gesture. He’d been raised in an observant family in Rock Island, Illinois. During his senior year of high school, he studied at a yeshiva in Chicago. As a university mandarin at Harvard, he treated Hillel as a spiritual anchor—the place where he often joined the daily minyan.

Now, in the rawness of the moment, Garber heard directly from Israeli students about the ostracism they had long faced at Harvard. “They might sit down at dinner with a group of students who didn’t know them and have a very pleasant conversation,” he told me. “And when the other students learned that they were Israeli, the other students would ignore them or shun them completely. Or they’d get up and leave. This is a particularly corrosive form of discrimination.”

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For years, Garber had worried about how hostility toward Israel was becoming established on campus. The problem wasn’t criticism of Israeli policy; it was the shunning of Israeli people, who were punished for their national origin. Zionists were treated as pariahs unworthy of inclusion in the Harvard community. No other religious commitment or national identity was socially radioactive in this way.

Whatever empathy Garber might have felt that night didn’t surface in Harvard’s official posture. Critics accused the university of reacting to the October 7 attacks with silence—a jarring absence, given its habit of weighing in on tragedies such as the killing of George Floyd and the invasion of Ukraine. Former President Larry Summers, who said he was “sickened” by the student statement, described himself as “disillusioned” by Harvard’s nonresponse. Only then, after a rush of similar criticism, did the administration issue a statement lamenting “the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend” and “the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.”

Facing pressure to say more, Claudine Gay followed up with a second message the next day: “Let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities”—a formulation tacitly conceding the proliferation of doubts. More than 100 faculty members, including Summers, signed a letter accusing her of drawing a false equivalence between Hamas’s rampage and Israel’s initial response. On October 12, Gay released a short video, in which she tried again: “Our University rejects terrorism—that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

As Gay flailed, pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campus. At a “die-in” outside the business school, protesters surrounded an Israeli student who was filming on his phone and physically removed him from the demonstration. (Two were later charged with assault and battery, though the court granted them pretrial diversion in exchange for undergoing anger-management training, performing community service, and taking a Harvard course on negotiation.) Some of the university’s big donors recoiled at what was happening in Cambridge. The Wexner Foundation announced that it was severing ties with the university. Billionaires followed, including Len Blavatnik, the owner of Warner Music, whose foundation had gifted $270 million to the school.

At that moment, a lifetime of bureaucratic training left many university presidents ill-equipped for managing inflamed passions. But Gay, new in the job, seemed more hamstrung than most. On December 5, she testified before the House Committee on Education & Workforce, alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In response to a question from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and Trump supporter, Gay refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s policies on bullying and harassment. Her over-lawyered, emotionally inert answer became infamous: “It depends on the context.” Garber, seated just behind her, was a bystander to catastrophe.

Five days after Gay’s testimony, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and a co-author, Christopher Brunet, published allegations of plagiarism in her dissertation. In most cases, she had sloppily neglected to cite sources; Rufo, reaching, declared that “racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.” Initially, the Corporation’s instinct was to defend Gay against what it saw as a coordinated attempt by the right to bully her from office.

But over winter break, members of the Corporation began to absorb just how much damage the past months had inflicted on Harvard’s reputation. As The New York Times later reported, Penny Pritzker, the chair of the Corporation, phoned Gay in Rome, where the beleaguered president was vacationing with her family. Pritzker asked the only question that mattered: Was there still a path forward? Gay understood that there wasn’t.

As she prepared to resign, the Corporation had nowhere to turn but Garber, who agreed to serve as interim president. “I basically had to say yes,” Garber told me. Harvard needed a stabilizing hand, someone who could keep the school out of the headlines and deflect the waves of crisis.

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As Garber absorbed the reality of his unexpected role, he began to imagine something more than caretaking. He had one last chance in his career to help Harvard confront the illiberalism that he had come to consider the underlying cause of its crisis. Perhaps a placeholder—someone with no designs on permanent leadership and a willingness to take political fire from faculty and students—would have the freedom to address the ideological rigidity that stifled classroom discussions and led smart people to shun heterodox opinion.

In part, his convictions were rooted in nostalgia for his undergraduate days at Harvard, which he remembers as a citadel of intellectual seriousness. His reverence for genius stretched back to his childhood in Rock Island. His father, a liquor-store owner, moonlighted as a violinist in the local orchestra. When virtuosos came to town, they often ended up at the Garber dinner table. As a teenager, he found himself seated across from the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

When he arrived at Harvard, he carried that same sense of awe that he felt at those dinners. His parents, true to type, hoped he’d become a doctor. But he quickly fell under the spell of the economics department, packed with future Nobel winners. In a graduate course on labor economics, he met Summers, who became a lifelong friend. Unwilling to disappoint his parents or abandon his new passion, Garber chose both paths: He became a bicoastal graduate student, earning a medical degree at Stanford while pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. He taught health-care economics at Stanford for 25 years—also founding research centers and practicing medicine—before returning to Harvard as provost.

His peers who studied the byzantine American health-care system often passed through Washington. But politics didn’t suit Garber. His instincts weren’t ideological. That same apolitical disposition shaped his campus life. He never fought Harvard’s battles with the fervor of a culture warrior; temperamentally, Kulturkampf was alien to him. As provost, he developed a managerial style that was therapeutic—patient in meetings, attuned to grievances. Faculty called him for intimate medical advice; his leather doctor’s bag sits on a shelf in his office. Sublimating his ego, he tended to the institution and never hesitated to carry out programs that he might have pursued differently, if he were the one in the president’s chair.

Yet gradually, and almost despite himself, Garber began to share some of the right’s critiques. The debates over race and identity on campus lacked the spirit of openness that he remembered from his own undergraduate bull sessions. “If you didn’t know where somebody stood on a controversial issue, when I was a student, it didn’t matter,” he told me. “You could still talk about it.” Garber had come to believe that a deepening culture of self-censorship was eroding the conditions that allowed excellence to flourish.

His critique isn’t a broadsided attack on DEI, but it brushes against it. As Harvard welcomed more students, many of them students of color who were the first in their family to attend college, the school shielded them from the discomfort of hurtful arguments. “There was a lot of deference to students who didn’t want to hear certain messages,” Garber told me. In his view, Harvard’s culture had tilted toward emotional safety, at the expense of intellectual risk. The harder task—teaching students to withstand ideas they disliked, to probe disagreement without retreat, to stay in relationship across political divides—had gone neglected.

As president, Garber launched a series of task forces to study the state of intellectual inquiry on campus. A university-led survey revealed that nearly half of the students, faculty, and staff—45 percent—felt uneasy sharing their views on controversial topics in class. Many feared that a stray opinion might trigger social reprisal. Some admitted to shaping their coursework to mirror what they presumed were their professors’ ideological leanings, not in pursuit of truth, but in search of a higher grade.

The faculty had its own theory of what had gone wrong. Professors lamented that undergraduates were pouring more ambition into their extracurricular activities than their coursework. Students were skipping class with impunity. Instructors, wary of backlash in end-of-semester evaluations, responded by easing workloads and inflating grades. (At Harvard, the problem is referred to euphemistically as “grade compression,” not inflation.) Rigor, central to Harvard’s identity in Garber’s day, had become a liability.

This academic neglect only deepened the culture of self-censorship. One task force—the Classroom Social Compact Committee—noted a subtler but equally corrosive failure: “Students are not learning how to ask clarifying questions (including the important ability to acknowledge that they are confused about something).” Harvard, in other words, was routinely failing at the most basic task of liberal education: cultivating minds capable of independent thought. “If we can’t address that deeper cultural malady,” Garber told me, “we will never be fully successful as a teaching institution or as a research institution. Because in order to be successful in teaching, learning, and research, you need to be open-minded.”

These problems were immune to quick fixes. As interim president, Garber pushed through one major change: prohibiting the university from issuing official pronouncements on political events. Harvard also changed its undergraduate application, adding the prompt “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue.” But otherwise, Harvard remained stuck—mired in protest, and drifting ever further from the ideal of open inquiry that Garber hoped to restore.

On April 22, 2024, Harvard suspended the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s privileges as a student organization because it had helped to stage a protest that transgressed university rules. Two days later, activists pitched tents in Harvard Yard, joining the wave of encampments happening on campuses nationwide. For Garber, the timing was perilous: The protesters had seized the ground where commencement was set to unfold in just a few weeks.

Precisely what a college could actually change in Gaza wasn’t clear. But with Harvard’s $53 billion endowment and political influence, it was a protest target that made at least some strategic sense. Calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, protesters cast Harvard as a handmaiden to genocide—which meant they cast its president that way too.

Activists circulated a poster showing Garber as a devil, horned and seated on a toilet. It didn’t take a degree in medieval iconography to recognize anti-Semitic caricature. When the symbolism was pointed out, organizers quietly took the image down. Garber himself wasn’t especially rattled. But the episode gave him license to describe himself as a target of bigotry—and in the vernacular of campus politics, that granted him the moral authority of lived experience. He now had the platform to speak more forcefully about anti-Jewish bias and link it to what he saw as deeper institutional failings.

Soon after taking office, Garber had announced the creation of two parallel task forces—one focused on anti-Semitism, the other on anti-Muslim bias. Some critics dismissed the pairing as a false equivalence. But the symmetry reflected Garber’s hope that dialogue and debate were the best mechanisms for defusing charged disagreements. The two task forces submitted joint progress reports to the Corporation. To serve on both, Garber appointed the political theorist (and Atlantic contributing writer) Danielle Allen, who has long argued that universities have lost, and must recover, the habits of intellectual pluralism.

At the core of the crisis, Garber believed, was Harvard’s retreat from open inquiry. That retreat had created pockets of ideological orthodoxy—most notably at the divinity school, where the religion-and-public-life program hosted events in the spirit of “de-zionization,” including an inaugural webinar in which a speaker described “a specific Jewish sinfulness.” In Harvard Yard, that same rhetoric echoed in protest chants—“Zionists not welcome here”—a slogan that branded certain students as unworthy of civic participation. Garber gave an interview to The Harvard Crimson condemning that slogan. “There’s a disappointing level of ignorance among people who have very, very strong views,” he told me.

Engaging across political differences, in the spirit of open inquiry, wasn’t just Garber’s slogan; it was his strategy for easing campus tensions and rebuilding trust. When angry emails landed in his inbox, he responded quickly and graciously. He persistently engaged Harvard critics, including high-profile donors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Members of the Harvard Corporation watched Garber preside over a fraught gathering of donors, a room thick with grievance and ready for combat. Garber managed to calm the room, by robustly and empathically acknowledging their gripes. “Everyone came back and said, ‘Wow, this is the right man at the right moment,’” Shirley Tilghman, the former Princeton president and then a member of the Corporation, told me. Inside the board, a consensus was quietly forming: Harvard didn’t need another presidential search.

Still, for weeks in the spring of 2024, the protest encampment in Harvard Yard was a crisis Garber couldn’t fix. He heard troubling reports of harassment. Protesters had hoisted a Palestinian flag outside University Hall, one of Harvard’s most iconic buildings. When a university worker lowered it, a demonstrator chased the person down and attempted to reclaim the flag. Garber felt as if he had no choice but to authorize a police sweep to dismantle the encampment. But in a final gambit, he sent a message to the protesters: He would meet with them to discuss the endowment—though divestment from Israel was off the table. He wouldn’t promise amnesty. But he would expedite their disciplinary process, allowing them to learn their fates swiftly and move on with their lives. The students accepted. By the thinnest of margins, Garber was spared a violent confrontation.

Some of the protesters later complained that they felt hoodwinked, after misinterpreting his promise of speedy justice as a grant of leniency. By May 23, the day of commencement, 13 students had been barred from receiving their diplomas. When Garber appeared on the dais in his ceremonial robes, he was roundly booed, as attendees chanted, “Let them walk.” Nearly 500 faculty and staff signed a letter denouncing the punishments for their “unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary manner.” Later that month, on Alumni Day, an animal-rights protester dumped glitter on Garber’s head. “It’s fine,” he said, after brushing himself off. “I could use a little glitter.”

Then, as summer break dissipated the tension, the Corporation and the Board of Overseers made their decision. On August 2, it announced that Alan Garber would become the 31st president in Harvard’s 387-year history.

Far in advance, it was clear: The 2024 election posed a grave threat to the status quo in American higher education. Trump-style populists thrilled at the prospect of humbling elite universities. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once said, “The professors are the enemy.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis treated his public universities accordingly, banning critical race theory; weakening tenure protections; commandeering New College, a quirky liberal-arts school that has since become a showcase for conservative pedagogy. In Wisconsin, lawmakers insisted that the state’s flagship university, in Madison, install a professor of conservative thought, funded by the elimination of a program to recruit faculty members from underrepresented minority groups.

To fend off Trump, universities recruited Republican fixers, hiring K Street friends of Trump and lawyers from the right flank of Big Law. Harvard brought on Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who’d investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. And it hired William Burck, who’d represented many Trump White House figures during Robert Mueller’s Russia probe—and who continued to advise the Trump family as an outside ethics counsel. Burck was well practiced in brokering back-channel deals involving the White House; in one that he’d helped hatch, the law firm Paul, Weiss promised to do pro bono work on behalf of the president’s favored causes.

For someone as preoccupied with brand names as Donald Trump, though, Harvard would be too tempting a target to pass up. When musing in early April about the prospect of cutting the university’s funding, Trump said, “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

On April 14, three days after the late-night email from the Trump administration, Harvard learned that the government wasn’t bluffing. Its professors began receiving stop‑work orders on government contracts. On May 6, the National Institutes of Health terminated grants tied to research on antibiotic resistance and pediatric AIDS. On May 12, the Department of Defense canceled a bioweapons‑related study, and the Department of Energy pulled support for research on subatomic particles. None of these eliminated programs had anything remotely to do with anti-Semitism.

Harvard has some short-term cushion; this spring, it began to sell $1 billion in private-equity assets. But real austerity isn’t far off. Roughly 80 percent of the endowment is legally bound to specific purposes and inaccessible for plugging budget holes. Cuts have already begun. The Kennedy School has laid off staff. As a symbolic gesture, Garber gave himself a 25 percent pay cut—and more than 80 faculty members donated 10 percent of their salaries to cover shortfalls.

The extremity of Trump’s demands forced the university to protect itself by any available means. It sued the administration to restore its funding, even as it hoped that it could persuade the president to relent. By resisting Trump, Harvard further provoked him. “They want to show how smart they are,” the president fumed in the Oval Office in May. To punish this impertinence, the administration kept devising new ways to inflict pain on the institution.

In short order: The Department of Education demanded records of all foreign gifts. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened a civil‑rights investigation into alleged discrimination against white, Asian, male, and straight applicants. The White House accused Harvard of collaborating with the Chinese military. On Truth Social, Trump demanded the names of Harvard’s international students—then signed a proclamation barring them from entering the United States. Trump publicly vowed to revoke Harvard’s tax‑exempt status and instructed his sons to cut ties with William Burck. And his administration instigated a process to strip Harvard’s accreditation.

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As I watched Trump’s fusillade, I thought back to 2019, when I reported on Viktor Orbán’s campaign to close Central European University, in Budapest. Orbán harassed the university using legal fine print, imposing onerous new requirements, grinding the school down until it fled to Vienna. That story had once felt extreme. But even Orbán never dared anything as heavy-handed as what Trump is doing to Harvard.

When I raised the subject of the Trump administration, Garber grew reticent. There were things he couldn’t discuss, given that Harvard was slogging through negotiations with the White House. That the university would seek a settlement is understandable. A presidential vendetta is all-consuming: Will international students be allowed to enter in the fall? Will crucial research projects survive? Without a deal, Harvard is placing its future in the hands of the courts—hardly reliable bulwarks these days.

Harvard wants to convince the administration that punishment is unnecessary because it has already taken meaningful steps to address the heart of the White House’s critique. The university removed the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It expanded harassment policies to include anti-Israeli bias, suspended programs at the public-health and divinity schools that leaned too far into activism, and increased kosher food offerings. In April, it renamed the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—now the Office for Community and Campus Life. It is contemplating a new academic center where conservative and free-market ideas might flourish.

Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun

In normal times, even one of these moves might have caused a revolt. And some objections to Garber’s policies do seem to manifest themselves in bureaucratic obstinacy. For instance, Harvard deans have missed deadlines for reports mandated by his anti-Semitism task force. But having been cast as a figure of resistance, Garber has earned the political capital to pursue his agenda. At commencement this May, he received a sustained ovation. In a Crimson survey, 74 percent of arts-and-sciences faculty expressed satisfaction with his leadership—far higher marks than the Corporation received.

That capital isn’t infinite. Garber has ventured into dangerous territory, negotiating with a White House that doesn’t care about the details—only the imagery of submission. That places him in an excruciating dilemma. He must protect careers, research, and the basic quality of academic life, while also avoiding any precedent that could lead to a broader collapse of liberal institutions. He can push for a settlement that formalizes changes that he’s already made—and maybe even helps him implement additional reforms—but will face intense pressure from the administration to trade away Harvard’s independence.

Garber is the quintessential liberal institutionalist in an age when such figures are faring poorly. His reverence comes from his own experience—how Harvard lifted him from Rock Island; how it placed him in classrooms alongside future scientists and economists whom he regards as the smartest people on the planet; how, even as a member of a once-excluded minority, he felt entirely at home. Although Garber knows that many Jews at Harvard no longer feel that same sense of belonging, he is also achingly aware of the irony—that he is a Jewish university president defending his institution against enemies who present themselves as protectors of his people.

Garber also knows that the place he loves so deeply has grown widely disdained, a symbol of arrogance and privilege. To save Harvard, to recover its legitimacy, he must succeed in both of the campaigns that he is waging in defense of liberalism. If Harvard fails to conquer its own demons, or if it fails to safeguard its own independence, then it will have confirmed the harshest critiques leveled against it, and it will stand no chance of ever reclaiming the place it once occupied in American life.