Harvard President on Trump Attacks: ‘The Fight Came to Me’

The Trump administration is waging a campaign against elite universities. In an interview with WSJ Editor in Chief Emma Tucker, Harvard President Alan Garber explains why he’s taken up the fight—and where he agrees with Trump. Photo: Bloomberg/Adam Falk

The Trump administration has launched an effort to reshape elite higher education, freezing or cutting billions in federal funding and pushing for government oversight on campuses to combat what it says is rampant antisemitism and a lack of ideological diversity. Harvard University is leading the resistance against this assault—though its president, Alan Garber, doesn’t disagree with much of the administration’s diagnosis.  

“It’s not that the goal, for example, of increasing ideological diversity on campus is one that I disagree with,” Garber said in an interview with Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief. “It’s the means of achieving it.” 

Watch Tucker’s interview with Garber, in which he explains his choice to fight back against the administration, makes a case for why the nation’s richest university needs billions in federal funding, and addresses the decline of free debate on campus.