Alan Garber’s stand against Washington: A Jewish hero at Harvard - opinion

Harvard University’s graduation ceremonies on May 29 reflected the traditions of a 385-year-old institution founded 136 years before the establishment of the US.

The ceremony opened, as it has for many years, with the appearance, in top hat and morning coat, of the sheriff of Middlesex County (where Harvard is located), who tapped the ground three times with his ceremonial staff and declared that the program could now begin.

No doubt, the formality and the sequence of events harked back to British university tradition given where the original colonists had grown up.

Soon thereafter Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s 31st president, who took over in August of last year, stepped down from the regal chair that symbolizes the stature of the university’s president and moved to the rostrum. He was greeted with an eight-minute standing ovation, as the entire assemblage – graduates, faculty, staff, and guests – rose to give him honor.

What was it about this Jewish 70-year-old native of Rock Island, Illinois, the son of Jean and Harry Garber, that elicited such an enthusiastic, heartfelt, passionate, and respectful outpouring of adoration at a school that was famous for its 20th-century Jewish quotas on entering students?

How to protect Jewish students in modern-day America

To be clear for the record, Harvard’s own recent report on the threats to Jewish students on campus, particularly after the events of October 7, painted a picture of Jewish students being bullied, prevented from walking through certain areas of campus, being harassed and made to feel threatened.

For sure, the challenge presented to the academic community as to how to protect its Jewish students in modern-day America must be addressed. However, Garber understood clearly that the demands being made by the Trump White House were neither directly related to the issue of how Jews fared on campus nor would their implementation do anything to make even one Jewish student feel safer.

For example: Directing the university to immediately disenroll its 6,800 foreign students will not make one Jewish student feel safer.

Eliminating the hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for university-sponsored medical research will not make one Jewish student feel safer, but could make a lot of Americans sicker as the years pass.

Giving over control of the university’s curriculum to Washington bureaucrats will not make one Jewish student feel safer.

Frankly, if Washington is serious about solving the ills of American academia, they would be better served by severely limiting the amount of additional funds Gulf Arab countries can sink into the corpus of US education. The tens of billions of dollars already accepted and the influence that this buys is a case of the horse having already left the barn. But putting a limit on new monies coming in would actually have a positive effect vis-à-vis many of the ills of the current system.

Against the unprecedented pressure from Washington and the legal threats associated with that pressure, Garber did what any self-respecting private university president should do – he emphatically said no, and had Harvard’s attorneys file suit against the federal government.

This was exactly the opposite of the reaction of Columbia University, which tried to appease Washington; and we, of all people, know where and how appeasement ends, and it is not pretty.

GARBER HAS been active in Harvard’s leadership for the past 14 years. He was Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer from 2011 to 2024 and interim president from January 2, 2024, until he assumed the presidency in August.

He is also the Mallinckrodt professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School, a professor of economics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, professor of public policy in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and professor in the department of health policy and management in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An economist and physician, he studies methods for improving healthcare productivity and healthcare financing.

He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Physicians.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Garber received a PhD in economics from Harvard and an MD with research honors from Stanford.

His standing up to Washington has been a beacon of light for other university presidents as well, many of whom have now joined together with him to say “no, not on my watch.” He has led by example in the tradition of true leaders who, although they step forward alone, ultimately find that they have many who follow.

At the Harvard graduation, all of those assembled understood that they were in the presence of greatness given the example that this normally thoughtful, humble, and devoted public servant set for America’s academic community. For this he deserves the title of Jewish hero, as his actions reflect the very values our faith demands of us.

The writer is founder and chairman of Atid EDI Ltd., an international business development consultancy. He is also the founder and chairman of the American State Offices Association, former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, and a past chairman of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.