‘The fight came to me’: Harvard president reflects on battle with Trump administration

Harvard President Alan Garber reflected on Harvard’s front-line position in the Trump administration’s battle with higher education, saying some common ground is found in the problems but not in the solutions.  

“It’s less that I chose to take on the fight than that the fight came to me,” Garber told The Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration paused billions in funding and threatened to take away the Ivy League school’s tax-exempt status. 

The fight began after Harvard said it would not bow to the federal government’s demands that it change policies relating to admissions and hiring, along with eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs.  

“It’s not that the goal, for example, of increasing ideological diversity on campus is one that I disagree with,” Garber told the outlet’s editor in chief. “It’s the means of achieving it.” 

Garber has said Harvard will be implementing new policies to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia and making new programs to encourage those who disagree with each other to talk through their differences openly. 

One of the big sticking points for the administration is a survey that shows a vast majority of Harvard’s faculty are liberal or progressive, with only 3 percent identifying as conservative.  

“One thing I can tell you is, it’s nothing deliberate about our hiring policies or our tenure policies, and I think there are certain fields where people with more liberal or left wing points of view feel more welcome. It may be that we don’t have as many conservatives as we should have,” Garber said. 

“Part of it also may be that people don’t feel comfortable speaking out when they disagree. Part of what we need to do is make sure that in the classroom and in other settings, we promote the idea that it doesn’t matter what your personal views are, you need to teach in a way that is fair to multiple points of view,” he added.

As the fight continues, Garber stressed the impact the federal government will have on medical research and technological advances if it keeps funding away from the Ivy League school.  

“The vast bulk of our federal funding is for support of research through grants and contracts. These are agreements that oblige the university to carry out work that the federal government has approved in order to advance national interests,” Garber said.