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{shortcode-213100a0aafb21ee104ab5db00b32955bc42ed20}he applause started before he said a word.
On May 10 — just weeks after Harvard filed suit against the Trump administration — University President Alan M. Garber ’76 stepped into a room of more than 1,000 Harvard rowers and alumni. According to five attendees, Garber did not bring up the case. He did not mention the billions in funding cuts. He did not mention Trump.
Instead, Garber, a former coxswain at Harvard, talked about rowing — about reading the current, staying calm, knowing when to steer, and when to hold course.
By the time he had finished, they had given him three standing ovations.
At a campus now used to crisis, Garber’s words found their mark, not for what he said, but for what he seemed to represent: control, clarity, and a kind of reluctant bravery. After trying backchannel conversations with White House officials, a letter — apparently sent by mistake — with unprecedented demands forced Garber’s hand.
“We did not see ourselves as looking to pick a fight,” Garber said in a Friday interview. “We saw ourselves cast in the role.”
Despite his reluctance, Harvard has been met with a tidal wave of praise since the president took the extraordinary step of defying Trump demands last month.
National Basketball Association coach Steve D. Kerr praised Garber for “standing up to the bully” during an April 15 postgame press, and comedian Ronny Chieng said people should support the University though it feels like “rooting for Jeff Bezos to win the lottery.” Even right-wing influencer Candace Owens called on her followers last month to “buck up and root for Harvard.”
But the support masks a deeper reality: Harvard is still trapped in a political fight it spent months trying to avoid — one that it can no longer control.
The University has lost $3 billion in federal funding and been forced to cut degree-granting programs and pause faculty hiring. Officials are staring down a catastrophic endowment tax bill, and now, the fate of more than 7,000 international students hangs in the balance.
Though most of the Trump administration’s punishments are being challenged in court, the litigation will take months if not years. Even if a judge rules in Harvard’s favor, appeals are all but guaranteed, and some hits to funding may be irreversible.
This account is based on interviews with more than 100 administrators, politicians, donors, faculty, and Harvard insiders with knowledge of the University’s strategy in response to its most precarious situation in decades. Many applauded Garber’s approach to the crisis so far, but warned that the standoff with Washington was far from over.
Bracing for Impact
Garber had spent the first year of his presidency trying to contain political fallout from protests and leadership instability, a mission that became far more dire after Donald Trump took office.
Just days before Trump’s inauguration, Harvard retained Ballard Partners, a high-powered lobbying firm with deep ties to Trump’s inner orbit. It was an early signal that Harvard was preparing for confrontation — even if it didn't yet know what shape the fight would take.
By then, Garber had already met with more than 40 members of Congress, part of a coordinated outreach over the past year to rebuild Harvard’s standing on Capitol Hill. He had focused on calming the legislative front — repairing frayed relationships and reinforcing Harvard’s institutional credibility.
But the threat now wasn’t coming only from Congress, and Trump had been a difficult political figure to predict.
During a faculty meeting in early December, Garber was worried about what was to come. He forecasted what he thought would be a strenuous time for the University under Trump, according to a faculty member in attendance.
Harvard quickly settled two federal Title VI antisemitism complaints just one day after Trump took office, agreeing in the process to adopt Republicans’ preferred definition of antisemitism and formally clarified that Jewish and Israeli students were covered under its nondiscrimination policies.
The settlement resolved a monthslong legal dispute — but also sent a message: to the plaintiffs, to University affiliates, and perhaps most of all, to Washington. Harvard was trying to show it understood the moment.
At first, the message seemed to land. When the Trump administration returned to power, it issued a broad, vague freeze on federal funding — a move that seemed aimed more at higher education as a whole than any one institution. When the administration started attacking individual universities, it was Columbia University that appeared to be the biggest target.
By early March, Harvard had landed on a list of universities flagged by the administration’s new federal antisemitism task force. Soon after, the White House escalated the pressure, publicly naming Harvard as a target of the inquiry. What began as a vague, sector-wide threat had become a formal Title VI investigation.
Harvard scrambled to get ahead of it.
Harvard administrators were “proactive” in reaching out after the investigation was announced, according to a person familiar with the task force. University officials held multiple meetings with members of the task force in an attempt to answer questions, demonstrate cooperation, and avoid becoming the administration’s first enforcement example.
Even as pressure mounted externally, top Harvard officials moved to reassure key internal stakeholders. In late February, senior administrators — including Provost John F. Manning ’82 — told a private gathering of major donors that Harvard was choosing its battles carefully. Sometimes, he said, the University would take the lead in pushing back against Washington. Other times, it would step back and stay quiet.
After the White House hit Columbia with a $400 million funding cut, Garber braced himself, cancelling a planned trip to India over spring break. According to a person with direct knowledge of his thinking, Garber believed staying put would help avoid any political fallout and signal a comment to Harvard’s internal priorities.
But the outcome he tried to avoid landed at his doorstep anyway — and in a much more forceful way.
‘No Choice’
At first, Harvard got a softer hand, offered an opportunity to negotiate with the White House and temporarily spared from Columbia’s fate.
When the Trump administration placed more than $8 billion in Harvard’s federal funding under review in early April, the University braced for fallout — but unlike other Ivy League schools, it first received a letter with specific demands instead of an immediate cut.
“We are pleased that Harvard is willing to engage with us on these goals,” wrote Sean Keaveny, acting general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a press release announcing the review. “Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized anti-Semitism, though long overdue, are welcome.”
The University had already begun making changes that seemed to anticipate what the federal government would soon demand, including removing the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a center that had faced repeated accusations of hosting antisemitic programming and severing its partnership with Birzeit University, the largest institution in the West Bank.
So when the April 3 letter arrived, its demands were broad, but not entirely unexpected. It called for a comprehensive mask ban on campus protests, reforms to disciplinary policy, clearer lines of administrative authority, and the elimination of all race- or identity-based preferences in admissions and hiring.
To some of Harvard’s officials, those demands weren’t viewed as entirely unreasonable — invasive, but not out of step with the types of accountability measures already being quietly discussed on campus.
“The Trump administration’s approach to Harvard is extralegal and extortionate,” wrote former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers in a statement. “That is why Harvard has to resist.”
“But to be credible and to be true to its Veritas mission, it has to reform much more than it has on issues like maintaining order, resisting identity politics, promoting excellence and truth seeking, and achieving intellectual diversity,” he added.
At the time, some in Trump’s orbit took Harvard’s response as a sign that a deal could be reached. According to a person familiar with the discussions, White House officials were encouraged by Harvard’s engagement — and believed it was helping the Trump administration’s political image.
Ivy League leaders also began to take notice. According to a person familiar with the matter, a group of Ivy League presidents met to discuss the demands issued to Columbia and Harvard. The group established a bottom line — they would comply with lawful civil rights investigations by federal agencies but rebuff demands that would infringe on academic freedom.
Then came the second letter.
On the night of April 11, the Trump administration sent Garber a dramatically expanded list of demands, including orders to derecognize pro-Palestine student groups, submit to three years of federal audits, and report international students who violated University conduct policies to the federal government. The possibility of a negotiated agreement vanished.
Over the weekend, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — hammered out a forceful response. The decision was not unanimous. At least one member, KKR co-CEO Joseph Y. Bae, opposed directly confronting the administration and warned that such a move could worsen the backlash, according to the New York Times.
But the Corporation moved ahead.
In an forceful April 14 email to Harvard affiliates, Garber denounced the administration’s demands as a sweeping overreach of federal power — and made clear that Harvard would not comply. That same day, the White House retaliated — pulling $2.2 billion in federal funding.
That night, members of the Corporation were informed by Harvard’s lawyers that the Friday demands letter was allegedly sent in error, according to the Times. And while some members bought the White House’s explanation, the damage had already been done.
Retaliation over the next week was staggering. Dozens of federally funded research grants were terminated. Layoffs quietly began in affected labs. At the Harvard School of Public Health — which relies heavily on federal dollars — internal conversations turned to contingency planning.
“We were faced with a very stark situation in which the government seemed to demand an unprecedented set of demands concerning how the university operates,” Garber said in the Friday interview.
“We saw ourselves as being given the choice of standing up for fundamental rights of universities, including First Amendment rights, or letting this demand go by,” he added. “When you think of it in those terms, there really was no choice.”
‘You Can’t Bow’
As support swelled in public, pressure built in private — and Garber set out to contain both.
In the weeks after Harvard filed its first lawsuit against the Trump administration, Garber launched a second campaign — not in court, but across the country. Early this month, he traveled to Washington for a round of private conversations on Capitol Hill.
According to a spokesperson, Garber met with lawmakers to discuss issues affecting Harvard, including funding for research — but declined to comment on who he met with.
On campus, he’s met in small groups with some of the University’s most influential benefactors, many of which have buildings in their name, according to a person familiar with the conversations in Massachusetts Hall. Some have urged Harvard to take a more careful, less confrontational approach, worried that the conflict could needlessly escalate.
Garber also traveled to New York in early May, where he met with Harvard alumni and donors at the Harvard Club of New York. His message there was simple: the conflict was escalating, and Harvard needed their support.
Even as Garber became a media darling — profiled in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and The Boston Globe — the pressure had not eased. More than $2 billion was still frozen, and a menacing letter from the Department of Homeland Security had set up a bigger problem for international enrollment.
“I grew up in a blue-collar district,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in an interview with The Crimson. “The people I represent don’t wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Oh my god, Harvard’s in trouble.’”
Still, Smith said, Harvard’s strategy was the right one — and had the backing of Democratic legislators in Congress.
“They are standing up and fighting back against it,” he said. “You cannot bow to what the dictator is asking you to do and you have to build support for that.”
Garber’s effort to shore up support only grew more urgent last week.
On Thursday, the DHS revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students — a stunning move that sent shockwaves across campus and entrenched the standoff between Harvard and the White House. Harvard quickly filed a second lawsuit in response.
What had been confined to federal funding became a far more personal battle for students’ futures.
“My message to international students is that they are a vital component of our community,” Garber said on Friday. “Under no circumstances will we abandon them.”
The Long Game
There is no quiet off-ramp — and Harvard knows it.
With two lawsuits pending, billions in federal funding slashed, and a wave of escalating threats from the Trump administration, Harvard has found itself locked in a battle it didn’t choose — and increasingly, can’t escape.
The administration cut another $450 million in grants and paused all future grants earlier this month. The U.S. House of Representatives also passed a bill to impose a 21 percent tax on Harvard’s endowment — a measure that has long been a nightmare scenario for the University.
And while Harvard has not publicly tied any of its recent decisions to growing federal pressure, the timing is hard to ignore.
In an abrupt move late April, Harvard renamed its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to “Community and Campus Life,” citing a new mandate to support free expression and expanding cross-cultural engagement.
That same day, Harvard also announced that it would suspend funding for affinity group celebrations during Commencement, including events held for veterans and first-generation, low-income students.
The decisions came less than two weeks after the White House called for a complete dismantling of DEI infrastructure at Harvard — and in the wake of its longstanding crusade against diversity.
When asked to explain the rationale for the changes in a Friday interview, Garber said he was involved, but directed further questions to Chief Community and Campus Life Officer Sherri A. Charleston — an administrator who does not answer emails from reporters.
Garber also declined to comment on Harvard’s interest in pursuing an out-of-court settlement. But several faculty members believe it’s a likely scenario — or at least, one that remains actively under deliberation.
Behind the scenes, Harvard is preparing for a long road ahead. The University did not seek a temporary restraining order when it filed its first lawsuit, meaning that the $2.2 billion freeze will remain in place through at least the summer.
“The speculation that happens among faculty is that Harvard is under a lot of pressure to come to some kind of settlement,” said government professor Ryan D. Enos.
“One of the questions is whether Harvard would ultimately settle in a way that they think would give the Trump administration something that they could call a win without giving up the things that Harvard values like its independence,” he added.
In the meantime, congressional investigations are still arriving in droves. Internal audits have begun. And additional funding cuts are on the horizon. When asked what comes next, Garber paused.
“We are making preparations along a very broad front,” he said.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.
