It would not be quite right to say that anyone won the battle of Harvard Yard. But Alan M. Garber, the interim president of the university, has survived it — for now.
Protesters were exiting the yard Tuesday after about three weeks of camping out, and they’ll likely be reinstated soon as students. School leaders have agreed to meet to discuss the university’s investment practices, but Garber has told them Harvard will not divest from Israel. Preparations for commencement can move forward, to the relief of thousands with plane tickets and hotel reservations.
Garber outlasted the protesters, and did so without calling in police or using over-the-top rhetoric to shame student demonstrators. It’s a best-case scenario in one of the grimmest academic years in Harvard’s recent history — and, surely, in Garber’s career. Some think this test of his leadership has proven his mettle to stay on permanently as president.
“I suspect it reinforces Alan’s approach to conflict,” said Barbara McNeil, a Harvard Medical School professor, radiologist, and longtime friend of Garber. She described him as even-handed, calm, logical, with the “ability to think about downstream consequences.”
The secretive Harvard Corporation, the school’s top governing board, has yet to assemble a search committee to find a successor to Claudine Gay, who resigned on Jan. 2 amid plagiarism accusations and criticism of her handling of campus antisemitism. Some faculty view this as a nod to Garber’s performance thus far.
Garber, who declined an interview, has not indicated whether he is interested in the permanent role.
In the last several weeks, Garber faced enormous pressure from students, professors, alumni, parents, and conservative politicians with strong and conflicting views on what should be done about the protesters and their divestment demands.
The protesters’ fight has sometimes turned harshly confrontational, personal, and vicious. Protesters have chanted outside Garber’s Hawthorn Street home. Last week a poster hung from a tree in Harvard Yard portrayed Garber, who is Jewish, as a devil, with horns and a tail, sitting on a toilet, with the words: “Alan Garbage funds genocide.” The depiction of Jews as demons is a longstanding antisemitic trope.
“It’s unbelievably stressful to have hundreds of people march to your house and stand on your front lawn screaming at you, calling you names,” said Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School who co-leads a Harvard faculty group, the Council on Academic Freedom. “Pictures of you looking like the devil — these are things that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
And it isn’t really over, protesters say. The demonstrators said they are entering “the beginning of a new phase . . . a shift in strategy” in their fight to get Harvard to divest from Israel. “Harvard beware,” the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine group posted on its Instagram account just before dismantling the camp, “the Liberated Zone is everywhere.”
A runner who has raced in marathons, Garber is known as thoughtful, cerebral. A physician with a PhD in economics, he has spent a lifetime thinking about the value of medical interventions, weighing the effectiveness of a cure against its costs.
He previously served as Harvard’s provost for about a dozen years. Several faculty members described him as principled and fair. Even those who at times have disagreed with his decisions respect him, said Alison Frank Johnson, a history professor.
“He didn’t mind that you disagreed with him,” Frank Johnson said about Garber’s time as provost. “He was boundlessly intellectually curious. If you have an argument about why he is making the wrong choice, he wants to hear it.”
Garber holds three Harvard degrees, completing his undergraduate degree in economics in 1976, before earning a master’s and PhD in economics, publishing a dissertation on the costs of antibiotic resistance. While pursuing his doctorate at Harvard, Garber was also working toward a medical degree at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
He completed a residency program in Boston at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before joining the faculty at Stanford, where he taught medicine, health research and policy, and economics for 25 years. He returned to Cambridge in 2011 under former Harvard president Drew Faust.
He was appointed interim president when Gay departed in early January. Since stepping into the role, he has helped defuse tension on a campus that was roiled by protests and controversies after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
“He stepped in to the leadership position this past January at, to say the least, one of the most challenging times in Harvard’s history,” said Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law professor. “He created some much-needed immediate calm.”
Garber created two task forces to study and combat antisemitism and anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias. When former Harvard president Larry Summers and Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized Garber’s appointment of Derek Penslar, a leading scholar of Zionism, to co-lead the committee on antisemitism, Garber did not waver. Garber thinks through decisions carefully, likely a result of his economics training, McNeil said.
“Alan has kept the temperature down more than at many other schools,” McNeil said. “It’s just a reflection of who he is as a person.”
Garber spent much of the spring semester rebuilding trust among donors, families, and prospective students who were concerned about the controversies from the fall, some of whom had lost faith in the institution and were deeply worried about reports of antisemitism on the campus. He traveled around the country and internationally to meet with alumni and donors in person, a spokesperson said, and held meetings with concerned affiliates in Cambridge. He also formed a working group to explore adoption of a policy of neutrality, in which the university would not take any position on current affairs to protect academic freedom of students and faculty.
“I am the interim president,” Garber said to Harvard Magazine in February. “But the problems we need to deal with are not interim problems.”
Over the winter he updated campus guidelines on protests to essentially forbid demonstrations in school buildings and limit disruption to university operations. Some criticized him, noting past generations of students used building takeovers and other disruptive tactics to push for changes. In 2001, students occupied Massachusetts Hall, home to the president’s office, and set up an encampment to push for living wages for Harvard workers. The efforts were largely successful and protesters received little or no discipline, according to an op/ed in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
Two Harvard Kennedy School graduates who participated in the 2001 protest recently wrote in the Crimson that Garber’s response to the Gaza protesters, in contrast, “feels contemptuous.”
Yet, the spring semester was going relatively smoothly compared to the fall, until late April when students camped out in Harvard Yard after demonstrators at Columbia University were arrested.
Student organizers sought to bring attention to the growing death toll in Gaza, where more than 34,000 have died since Israel invaded after the Hamas-led terror attack. They wanted Harvard to disclose and divest Israeli investments, and to drop disciplinary charges against students related to pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Harvard leaders let the encampment stand for weeks despite calls from some alumni and donors to call on law enforcement to remove it with force. Garber also didn’t negotiate with protesters; some schools that did, including Brown University and Rutgers University, faced swift backlash from conservative politicians and donors for engaging with pro-Palestinian demands.
Instead, Garber threatened to discipline the students, eventually suspending them so they could no longer move freely in and out of Harvard Yard and the surrounding buildings. He ultimately gave the pro-Palestinian student protesters a couple of face-saving concessions but made no commitments about divestment; more substantially, he agreed to all but drop the suspensions. Some still face separate disciplinary proceedings.
Ultimately, though, he simply outlasted them by making it uncomfortable and unproductive for the students to stay in a locked, largely abandoned Harvard Yard, without access to bathrooms, food, or the world outside. The protesters voted Monday night to dismantle the camp.
Leandro Urbano, who will graduate from the Harvard Kennedy School later this month, said the conflict seemed to come to a resolution without the constant media firestorm the school endured in the fall.
“President Garber has been much more balanced in his dealing with both sides,” Urbano said. He added that students participating in the encampment also remained “civilized.”
Garber has likely relied on his marathon trainings in recent days, said Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard who used to run with Garber.
Long-distance runners “don’t give up,” Lieberman said. “It’s about endurance.”
Globe correspondent Maddie Khaw contributed to this report.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com.