Alan Garber Has Met the Moment

When Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 announced in August 2024 that Alan M. Garber ’76 would drop his interim title and serve as Harvard’s 31st president for a three-year term, I penned a Crimson op-ed entitled, “Alan Garber May Be Harvard’s New Hope.” The announcement on Monday by the Harvard Corporation that Garber’s term is now indefinite deserves high praise — and a second op-ed to explain why.

Few would deny that Harvard’s reputation and ability to function as a premier research university have suffered greatly over the past several years. Good governance requires that the internal policies and actions that contributed to Harvard’s institutional strain be honestly, critically, and transparently assessed and — where possible — remediated.

Harvard’s governing boards have been historically secretive, making it difficult to know whether such self-assessments occur and, if so, what they have revealed. But their decision to hand the presidential reins to Garber on an indefinite basis speaks as loudly as we can expect about their views on Harvard’s past and future directions.

We should be grateful for that decision.

As I stated about Alan Garber in 2024, “He has the essential characteristics required of any president — academic distinction in an important discipline, a reputation for integrity, and success in his prior leadership roles,” which now includes nearly two years as Harvard’s president in some of the institution’s most turbulent years yet, endangered by both internal and external threats.

Garber’s leadership over the past two years has produced considerable change, undertaken with unusual speed and communicated with clarity. His actions have provided a foundation both for needed internal reform and principled resistance to external enemies of Harvard and higher education nationwide. To have rendered the primary architect and leader of that effort a lame duck at this moment would have been a serious error — now, thankfully, avoided.

What are the most notable actions and accomplishments that reveal Garber’s values and capacity for leadership of this great and incredibly complex university? First on my list was his early launch of a University working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue.

The group’s subsequent report, issued in October 2024, made clear that, despite their centrality to Harvard’s research and educational missions — and the presumption by many that things were fine — the state of open inquiry, intellectual diversity, and constructive disagreement at Harvard required urgent attention. Under presidential and provostial leadership, major reparative efforts are now underway across Harvard, including one I chair at Harvard Medical School.

A second indicator was the early endorsement of an “institutional voice” policy — similar to institutional neutrality policies elsewhere — under which institutional leaders would not issue statements on behalf of the University on contested social, political, and moral questions unless they bear directly on the University’s core missions. Garber lent the necessary presidential support and brought Harvard in line with a rapidly growing national movement.

The third, though arising from individual schools rather than presidential edicts, is the major signs of cultural progress that have followed Garber’s initiatives, including the decision by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to end the requirement for diversity statements in faculty hiring and major reforms of student orientation programming to stress the importance of engaging respectfully across difference rather than avoiding disagreement, or reporting it as requiring remediation.

Actions taken by schools to change programs (and program leadership) have been more controversial. When programs are judged to have strayed from the required level of scholarly rigor in favor of explicit activism, I see such decisions as within the purview of university leadership and proper governance — and failure to prevent such straying, in the past, has often proved to be the real problem. To counter expected opposition, decisions such as these must reflect rigorous assessment, be accompanied by public explanation, and remain content-neutral, aspects that require greater clarity than exists at present.

Some of the actions I praised may be noted to overlap with some demands for reform from the Trump administration. The intellectual and moral key is to articulate absolutely clear distinctions between internal reforms undertaken because they are required for us to live up to our missions and standards, and external demands that must be resisted because they violate our fundamental values and norms.

Whether or not a sorely needed reform appears on an external list of demands is an insufficient criterion to reject it.

President Garber has met the test in his response to the Trump administration, mounting a legal defense against specific demands that would have required the University to undermine its values, thereby earning respect for Harvard and his leadership at this perilous time.

No one can reasonably discount the challenges that lie before us, both in internal reform and in resistance to a hostile government that, at times, has made plausible the view that destroying Harvard was in fact its goal.

To succeed in this fraught environment requires a president who knows what truly matters, has the capacity for high integrity and courageous leadership to support those core commitments, and possesses the full backing of the University’s governing boards.

We have that individual in the person of Alan M. Garber — and he will have my strongest support in the years ahead.

Jeffrey S. Flier is the Higginson Professor of Medicine and Neurobiology and was the dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016. He is a co-president of the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard.