Can This Man 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.