Editor’s note: President Alan M. Garber’s April 14 response to the Trump administration’s letter demanding sweeping changes in University governance and academic affairs has attracted unprecedented attention nationwide. It has also sparked an outpouring of correspondence from members of the Harvard community. All arrived after publication of Harvard Magazine’s May-June issue (posted online earlier on April 14). As a service, we publish here the letters received in response to this week’s important developments, many of them directed to the president’s office with copies to the magazine’s letters to the editor mailbox.
I have never been prouder of my alma mater. The Good Ship Harvard sails on. My wife Alice and I have pledged by far the biggest gift to Harvard that we have ever made. It won't get anything named after us, but maybe, along with others, it will help strengthen the University’s resolve against thuggish directives from Washington.
John Tepper Marlin ’62
New York, N.Y.
As an Israeli-born immigrant to the United States, a Jewish American, and an alumnus of Harvard Law School, I want to congratulate you on your firm response to the Trump administration’s attempt to politicize, divide, undermine, and even take over our Harvard community.
A year and a half ago, after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, I was profoundly disappointed to watch how Harvard handled the protests on its campus, protests that clearly went beyond legitimate First Amendment expressions and threatened the constitutional rights of Jewish students and faculty and the right to be educated without harassment.
Since then, I have been watching the Harvard community grapple, through a laudable, systematic, and democratic process, with a whole range of First Amendment and racism issues affecting not just Jewish students but also Muslim, Asian, and other minorities.
In my 79 years, I still recall how many top Wall Street law firms would not hire any member of a minority group. For decades, Harvard has been a civil rights champion in addressing these issues, on behalf of all of us. This is not about being Jewish. We all depend on the Harvard community and your leadership to protect us against racism, discrimination, and authoritarianism. We urge you to continue the good fight for justice for a better world. We stand ready to contribute our financial resources to help you.
Joshua Bar-Lev, J.D. ’70
Portland, Ore.
Dear President Garber:
I have never been so proud to be an alum of Harvard as I am today. Thank you for standing up to the Trump administration’s insane demands.
Harvard’s approach also seems to me to be the only possible course, since apart from the obviously critical moral and academic reasons, Chamberlain-style appeasement clearly cannot work, does not work with Trump, and in fact has already been demonstrated in this exact situation to be worse than ineffective (for example, by Columbia).
I don’t know what the future holds in this fight and fear that things will only get far worse for both our country and for Harvard. But please continue to fight this madness with everything that Harvard has. I say this as a lifelong Republican and conservative (who, admittedly, has never supported Trump or Trumpism and has been horrified at the abandonment by the party of everything that it claimed to believe in). Regardless of anything else, Harvard must continue to fight for integrity and freedom from the craziness of this governmental overreach. If not, it would lose everything that made it special anyway.
Benjamin T. Beasley, J.D. ’10
American Fork, Utah
Dear Mr. President,
I commend and wholeheartedly support your determination to stand up to the bully Donald Trump and his appointees in the federal government, rejecting their illegal and unconstitutional demands of the University.
Specifically with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring and in student admissions (sometimes used interchangeably with affirmative action), as someone who worked for over 30 years on Executive Order 11246- and Title VI-covered programs at the U.S. Department of Labor, and as I have written in the Washington Post40 years ago and recently, “affirmative action” is one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in the current debate over civil rights.
I explained it was improper to use the term “affirmative action” to mean quotas, racial preferences, or reverse discrimination. Indeed, in striking down racial preferences in college admissions (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), nowhere did the Supreme Court equate those practices to affirmative action. Even in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas referred to “so-called affirmative action.” Quite simply, affirmative action or DEI programs, properly understood and implemented, do not violate Title VII or Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On that basis alone, Trump’s demands were improper and Harvard rightfully rejected them.
David A. Drachsler, LL.B. ’68
Alexandria, Va.
President Garber,
Your defiance of Donald Trump’s bullying, like the faculty’s recent full-throated refusal to grovel, has gone a long way to restore a measure of the faith and pride I have long enjoyed from my remote connection to Harvard. That faith was strained, I will say, and my pride tarnished, during recent noisy public posturing and bullying disloyalty from several wealthy alumni. Moreover, in that public debacle I listened in vain for Harvard’s forceful support for those among its students and faculty who troubled to protest what also has long appalled me and my family: America’s criminal collusion and profound moral culpability in bullying, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder in Palestine.
Donald Trump’s attack on Harvard now makes obvious how hollow and cynical, too often, that noisy bluster about “antisemitism” has become. The cruel “ethnic cleansing” has come home to our own borders, our towns and cities, our own neighbors. Moreover, Trump’s attempt now to bully Harvard, as Tim Snyder has taught us, is a standard gambit, an attempt to humiliate and humble any potent independent institution that might resist his takeover, taken right out of the playbook for wannabe dictators.
Who will defend the republic? The cowardly, obsequious rolling over of corporate and academic leaders, illustrious law firms, cabinet appointees, and American politicians has been alarming. So are the courts’ endless delays. Moreover, many of us are left entirely without representation. Our congressmen work for somebody else. And so we look in vain for a leader to emerge [whom] we can throw our own puny weight behind and so join an effective resistance. In all, I have not felt this disaffected from our federal government since I marched to the Pentagon during my senior year at the College. And so I have been wondering: Where is Gene McCarthy when we need him?
In this barren political dystopia, your dignified, principled, eloquent, and determined voice, leading Harvard, and speaking for us all, has been thrilling. It’s inspiring. I write to tell you so. You gave voice to the rest of us, and so you provide a leadership others may emulate, or get behind. Among my classmates—and for that matter, among all University alumni the world over, and all literate Americans—I know I am not alone in wishing to say: Thank you.
John A. McKinnon ’68
Kalispell, Mont.
I was heartened to see that Harvard University will not buckle to Trump’s bullying tactics, and I look forward both to other threatened universities rallying against Trump in unity, and to the fight ahead. I am only sorry that Claudine Gay is not at the helm. Thank you, Prof. Garber.
Jim Uleman, Ph.D. ’66
Pearl River, N.Y.
Good on Harvard for Resisting. A little token of appreciation:
The Oxen in Our Gardens
(Apologies to James Thurber)
Creatures of the natural world have always been useful bearers of messages—Lamb of God, Dove of peace, Violence’s dragon, Temptation’s snake, Wisdom’s owl, Vigilance’s prairie dog, the Long-memoried elephant…
And don’t forget that unicorn in the garden, and the unfortunate wife who didn’t take her husband’s word for it. Or the old saying about whose particular ox gets gored.
Tragically, those presently in power in Washington, D.C., and their supporters can’t see—or delude themselves into thinking they needn’t see—the herds of oxen surrounding not just other people—those lower on the scale of prosperity—but every person on the planet. These beasts are in our gardens, bedrooms, kitchens, offices; on the bus to work, in church—in fact everywhere. They aren’t mythical beasts: their goring gores us all.
Perhaps the most obvious example: global goring, ignoring climate change and its disastrous consequences. But how about the crippling of medical research into cures—for cancer and Alzheimer’s, for example—and prevention—the next global pandemic? And the potentially cataclysmic and violent wreckage from the rejection of the practical and moral benefits of the social safety net? Not to mention the historical proof of the damage arising from a denial of the Founders’ wisdom regarding free speech? The list goes on and on.
Centuries ago, our predecessors drew on their walls the creatures that sustained them. Perhaps it’s time to represent on ours the lessons that science and history have taught and are trying to teach us as well as the consequences of forgetting that in the long run we all stand or fall together, subterranean billionaire bunkers and extra-terrestrial living-arrangement reservations notwithstanding.
John Austin ’56, LL.B. ’60
Evanston, Ill.
Many of us, I presume, have been waiting for this letter and position from our president of Harvard University. You have my full support in this.
I have no disagreement with your statements under your topic of addressing “antisemitism.” I would like to caution that the term “antisemitism” has been weaponized to an extreme for political purposes to silence discussion, thoughts, and action about life and death matters beyond Jewish life.
This accusation of “antisemitism” against Harvard ultimately led to your need to write this letter, which is about a great deal more than “antisemitism” as you correctly explain. Therefore the term itself without clear definition, in context with all other harmful antipathy towards other national, ethnic, religious, and gender groups, is still a weapon that will be used against Harvard, other universities, and people throughout democratic societies.
Considering that Jewish members of Harvard’s community have supported positions, activities, and speech that another portion of Harvard’s Jewish community feels threatened by suggests that “antisemitism” isn’t the best term to describe what is occurring.
Since threats toward the rights, freedoms, and protections for all Harvard members must be addressed, the term “antisemitism” might need to be replaced with a more universal term applying to all people. Or you may need to find the terms that along with “antisemitism” include everyone. I personally would hold a meeting with a broad spectrum of Jewish members of the Harvard community to discuss how to apply the term “antisemitism” while equally protecting all Harvard community members from attacks based on their identities, which include their ideas.
Thank you,
David Souers, M.Arch. ‘82
Friendship, Me.
