Harvard’s President Alan Garber Talks About His Legal Fight With Trump

Dr. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, disagrees with President Trump about many things. He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its nonprofit tax status.

But Dr. Garber agrees with Mr. Trump on one point. In one of the rare interviews he has given since Harvard began its battle with the federal government, Dr. Garber said this week that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing.

Harvard has often shut out voices that many liberals disagree with, he said, and it has allowed antisemitism to go unchecked.

“The issue for me was not principally whether we had problems that we needed to address,” Dr. Garber said in a lengthy interview in Washington.

The problem is the Trump administration’s methods, which are growing more aggressive by the day. Last month, Trump officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funds intended for the university, to force it to comply with a series of demands Harvard says violate the First Amendment. On Friday, Mr. Trump escalated the attack, saying the Internal Revenue Service would take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status, threatening many millions more.

To Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not a provincial matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II.