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{shortcode-42dade63853bbbaed883fc95ab52061e7d1c601d}tudents leaving morning classes on April 23 witnessed a strange sight, even for Harvard — University President Alan M. Garber ’76, strolling through Tercentenary Theater with NBC Host Lester Holt, flocked by a camera crew.
The exclusive, a week after Garber declared public resistance against the Trump administration, was his first on-camera interview since becoming president and his first public media appearance of any kind in more than four months.
Following his period of extended silence, the TV one-on-one with Holt kicked off an unusually active media campaign for the Harvard president. Garber gave interviews to the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal in the following weeks, framing the University’s fight as one for the future of higher education and democracy.
“We cannot compromise basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights,” Garber told Holt.
It was a sharp departure from the strategy of silence Garber had adopted for the semester after telling faculty last year that the University’s communication strategy needed a remodel.
In the preceding months, Garber and most Harvard schools’ deans drew back from interviews with The Crimson, the only financially independent news publication that administrators had agreed to regular interviews with. For decades, Harvard’s leaders have granted only exceedingly rare interviews to national outlets.
The shift to silence — neither acknowledged nor explained — reflected a University administration scarred by a public relations disaster that had slowly built to Gay’s resignation in January 2024, and a new president determined not to repeat past mistakes. Now, Garber’s media tour represents a new phase of Harvard’s battle: one where the public must be won as allies and Harvard’s mission cemented as a rallying cry.
A University spokesperson declined to comment for this article.
A Tradition of Access
Harvard has not always had such a complicated relationship with the media.
When former Crimson President Daniel A. Swanson ’74 reported on Harvard’s administration in the 1970s, he had an amicable, even personal relationship with then-Harvard President Derek C. Bok. Swanson knew Bok’s home phone number, and frequently talked to his wife, Sissela Bok, who would often answer the phone. Sissela Bok even initially agreed to allow a Crimson reporter to spend time at her house during parties and meetings, before her husband decided against it.
Derek Bok briefly suspended the interviews over a dispute with The Crimson in 1986, but he reinstated the practice the same year.
Every Harvard president since Bok has sat for regular interviews with The Crimson until the end of 2024. The University’s provost, school deans, and chair of the highest governing board also regularly agreed to wide ranging on-the-record conversations about administrative policy and controversies during their tenures.
Harry R. Lewis ’68, who served as dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003, said that his relationship with the media was far more “friendly and quite informal” during his tenure than he perceives it to be today.
“I’m told that faculty are now briefed on dealing with the press. There was never a faculty meeting in my day that I can remember where we were briefed on how to deal with the press,” he said. “I don’t ever remember being told that I shouldn’t take a call from a reporter.”
A University spokesperson declined to comment on whether faculty members are instructed not to speak with journalists.
When the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, undertook reforms in the 2010s, it committed to engage more with the media by committing the senior fellow to biannual interviews with The Crimson and Harvard Magazine, according to Corporation Senior Fellow William F. “Bill” Lee ’72.
“We began at the time to, twice a year, have the senior fellow do interviews — once in December, once in May before Commencement, with you, with the Gazette, with the Magazine — and I actually did them,” Lee said. The Harvard Gazette is a division in the University’s communications office, and the Harvard Magazine is an editorially independent paper owned by a nonprofit affiliate of Harvard.
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During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, Lee drew back from interviews. He explained in a September interview with The Crimson that “there were so many things going on to address the pandemic that those twice a year interviews just fell by the wayside.”
The regular interview cadence did not resume after the pandemic.
Lee’s predecessor Penny S. Pritzker ’81 — the current senior fellow — has given only a handful of interviews since taking office in July 2022. She declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson.
The Administration Goes Quiet
Harvard’s relationship with the national press took a nose dive in the wake of its botched response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel and the ensuing campus protests.
Then-President Claudine Gay released a series of emailed statements in the fall that, along with high-profile protests, kept Harvard on the front page of national papers. She was still giving interviews though the end of her tenure, even apologizing for her disastrous Congressional testimony in a Crimson interview days after returning from Washington.
Garber set out to stem the flow of bad press.
He set the tone for an insular beginning to his presidency by appointing John F. Manning ’82, the then famously media-shy dean of Harvard Law School, as the University’s interim provost. As HLS dean and later provost, Manning repeatedly declined interviews with The Crimson and other media outlets — breaking the precedent Garber had set by interviewing regularly as provost. Since joining the Harvard faculty in 2004, Manning has rarely spoken publicly to journalists.
Harvard’s adoption of an institutional neutrality policy — which instructs the University’s leaders not to make statements about contentious political issues not related to the administration — added pressure on officials not to speak to the media.
Garber was still giving interviews, but he appeared to violate the new policy just months later, telling The Crimson in October that a statement by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was personally “offensive” while declining to comment in his capacity as president. The move angered faculty, some of whom said the comment reflected a double standard in the application of the institutional voice policy.
It also served as a warning to deans, who can speak publicly, but have to tread a fine line between speaking about the administration and speaking about political issues that involve Harvard. Beyond outgoing Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne, only two deans — Harvard School of Dental Medicine Dean William V. Giannobile and Harvard Extension School Dean Nancy J. Coleman — have given interviews to The Crimson since Garber’s October interview.
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra stopped sitting for interviews after April 2024, and multiple other faculties’ deans repeatedly postponed or canceled planned interviews with Crimson reporters, sometimes only minutes in advance, without rescheduling this spring.
Harvard schools frequently coordinate their media appearances with Central administration officials, but a spokesperson declined to comment on whether they had been instructed to stop speaking.
During a sit-down interview with The Crimson in December 2024, Garber was asked to address Manning’s decision to not speak publicly, but the president never got the chance to answer.
The question was interrupted by Harvard Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications Paul Andrew, who was sitting in on the conversation, next to Garber. Andrews said the question about media relations was not on a pre-approved list of topics for the interview.
“I think we’re not going to get to this,” Andrew said before Garber could speak.
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Isra Ali, a media and communications professor at New York University, said the controversy surrounding Gay’s resignation likely prompted Harvard to pull back from the media in the ensuing months.
“The University probably felt like its best bet was to pull back from any type of official communication and really just focus on trying to maintain a sense of stability, to alumni, to the students, to the faculty,” Ali said.
Only Khurana and Dunne have kept up regular media appearances. Khurana in particular has sat for interviews with student reporters each semester for the duration of his decade-long tenure.
“You’re my students,” Khurana explained in his last interview with The Crimson on May 20. “I mean, I feel like the primary responsibility I have is to create an environment for the undergraduates’ intellectual, social, and personal transformation.”
“This is for me — I’m not saying it’s right for everybody,” he added.
Garber’s Media Tour
But after the White House sent a list of demands on April 11 that stunned top administrators and members of the Corporation, the University scrapped its strategy of silence for a publicity tour.
Garber slammed the White House’s demands to derecognize pro-Palestine groups, submit to three years of federal audits, and report international students who broke University conduct policies to the federal government in a blistering email to Harvard affiliates.
The message was accompanied by a revamped website that highlighted scientific research impacted by funding cuts and a flurry of posts on X advertising Harvard’s decision to defy the White House.
Harvard’s resistance was met with an outpouring of support from University faculty and students, peer institutions, and top Democratic lawmakers. And Garber seized the moment — appearing in a series of interviews with national outlets, where he said that Harvard would not yield to political pressures that threatened its core values.
Garber’s media tour — and the University’s more adversarial stance against the Trump administration — have proved largely successful. The Associated Press conducted a survey in May that found that 56 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s policies towards higher education.
But Harvard’s more visible media presence has not stopped the stream of funding freezes from Washington — and, if anything, has only inflamed tensions with the Trump administration. Just hours after Garber publicly rejected the administration’s demands, the government paused more than $2.2 billion in funding. And in the weeks since, the White House has tacked on more than $1.5 billion in further funding freezes.
And there are still policies top Harvard officials have been unwilling to explain in detail, including the University’s decision to dismiss the leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, not fund affinity group celebrations at Commencement, and rename its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
Garber’s next task will be balancing the decisions Harvard would rather keep quiet while giving the media a transparent protagonist.
“Often, the cost of staying silent is not that high,” Ali said. “Being quiet actually pays off in many respects.”
—Associate Managing Editor Cam E. Kettles and University Desk Editor Emma H. Haidar contributed reporting.
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.
