At Rebranded Diversity Forum, Garber Calls for More Disagreement to Bolster Harvard’s Academic Mission

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 urged affiliates last Tuesday to treat disagreement as a core feature of academic life, arguing that engaging with competing ideas is essential to how the University teaches and produces knowledge.

Speaking during the second day of Harvard’s annual Community and Campus Life Forum, Garber positioned the University’s ongoing efforts around campus culture within its broader intellectual mission, emphasizing that how students and faculty interact shapes what they are able to discover.

“Sustaining our academic excellence and nurturing our campus culture are not separate goals,” Garber said. “They’re profoundly and mutually reinforcing.”

The forum, a three-day event that brought together more than 200 affiliates in person and virtually, was the first held under the office’s new name after it was rebranded last April from the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. The programming reflected a broader shift in emphasis away from discussions around individual identity, with sessions focused on constructive dialogue and engaging across differences.

Garber said that meaningful inquiry depends on exposure to unfamiliar perspectives and a willingness to test one’s assumptions against evidence and argument.

“Truth is rarely found in echo chambers,” he said. “Your careful efforts throughout Harvard to ensure that people learn with and from one another have a great deal to do with the ultimate success of this university.”

He added that academic progress has long depended on individuals who challenge prevailing ideas, and said that universities must cultivate environments where such challenges are taken seriously.

“A community that embraces and encourages diverse viewpoints is a prerequisite for academic rigor,” Garber said.

The address comes as Harvard faces political pressure over its approach to diversity initiatives, including the Trump administration’s repeated demand that the University dismantle DEI programs. While Garber’s remarks echoed themes from previous years, he used the word “diversity” only once in his speech, in reference to “diverse viewpoints.”

University leaders grounded the forum’s theme in recent survey data showing a gap between students’ sense of belonging and their experience of connection on campus. Sherri A. Charleston, Harvard’s chief Community and Campus Life officer, said that more than 80 percent of students report feeling they belong at Harvard, but only 56 percent feel connected to campus life, and 45 percent report feelings of isolation.

The data also pointed to challenges in engaging across difference. Only 59 percent of respondents said they had formed satisfying relationships with people who hold different viewpoints, and several groups fell below 50 percent when asked about their comfort expressing opinions across ideological lines.

“What is so interesting about this is that it gives us an opportunity to think about what are the concrete things that we can actually be doing to solve for these,” Charleston said.

Drew Allen, Harvard’s associate provost for institutional research, said the findings have prompted more coordinated data collection across the University, including new survey questions on students’ comfort discussing controversial issues in the classroom. He added that it remains unclear whether affiliates themselves are seeking more engagement across difference.

“We’re making the assumption that that is something that our community wants,” Allen said.

Harvard Kennedy School professor Julia Minson, who delivered one of the forum’s keynote addresses, focused on how people navigate disagreement in practice. She led attendees through a framework designed to make difficult conversations more productive, saying people often misinterpret disagreement as hostility, which can shut down conversation altogether.

“There are situations where we think that a person really means us disrespect or even harm, and that’s not their intention,” she said.

She introduced a framework she calls “HEAR” — hedging claims, emphasizing agreement, acknowledging opposing perspectives, and reframing statements positively — and encouraged participants to adopt specific language strategies to signal openness during difficult conversations.

Minson also said she is developing an expanded training module on productive disagreement for the incoming Class of 2030, to be implemented alongside existing orientation programs.

“My preferred mode is to teach this to every high schooler,” Minson said. “I am very pleased that Harvard as a university has been putting in a lot of work and resources into this, and I am pleased the College is implementing this new training.”

Charleston closed Tuesday’s session by framing the importance of campus dialogue in expansive terms, drawing on an analogy often associated with former U.S. President John F. Kennedy ’40.

“In Kennedy School, through Logan Airport, we always see the big JFK thing that talks about going to the moon — not because we can, but because it is hard,” Charleston said. “So this is our moonshot.”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal @sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal @ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.