YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan M. Garber

lines on the record: 23
first: 2025-10-23
most recent: 2025-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I am optimistic about that, but I think it is extremely important is for Harvard and our peer institutions, for particularly other research universities, to reestablish trust in our institutions and our mission because what we've accomplished really would not have been possible without this incredibly successful partnership with the federal government, which has driven the research enterprise, as I said before.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost of providing an education at the kinds of universities that you've mentioned have gone up and up over time. In real terms for many of our universities, that is inflation adjusted terms, the tuition has gone down. And I'm talking about the nominal tuition. For the students who don't receive any financial aid, when you take into account financial aid, it's gone down.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's on the order of 60% receive financial aid. And I would add that students from families that earn less than $200,000 a year can attend Harvard College tuition free.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the problem we have to solve. I think that to fully address this, we do need a wider range of views on campus. It's not just about liberal, conservative. It's on all kinds of dimensions. We need a diversity of views. We need many different views, and we need to create an environment in which our students can speak freely. Because actually for students, I would say the most pernicious issue about this fear that the faculty are all from one part of the political spectrum, the fear is that the students who disagree can't express those views or they will be ostracized in some way. We have to overcome that. And I think we're making progress.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the core issue is really a question are our students exposed to the full range of serious views about important issues? It could be in science, it could be in my field of economics, it could be in political science in all kinds of areas. And there's a risk if the faculty lean all in one direction politically that they won't be capable of presenting views other than their owns and therefore our students won't be exposed. Oftentimes my professors would not reveal what their personal views were. Sometimes they did, but it was never with the idea that you would say only certain views are correct about this issue.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, David, I actually think that the top research universities in the US are all incredibly accomplished. And I don't feel as though Harvard is so far ahead of any other institution. We're stronger in some areas than Princeton and maybe not as strong in others. But the fact is we're a very different institution from Princeton because Princeton has PhD programs, but they did not invest heavily in professional schools. So they're covering a different part of the waterfront. But I would say that we've been fortunate in a number of ways, including the generosity of our alumni and friends has helped us. That's been true for the other preeminent research universities as well.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always ask on January 1st to step in as interim president on January 2nd. And I knew that being provost was a pretty demanding job, pretty much 24-7, and I was about to do two jobs that were 24-7 until I could put a new provost in place. So there's just the sheer volume of work was daunting. And then there's the fact that we were in a crisis, that we were under attack. My answer in normal times would be these are the advantages being present. This is what's annoying. What I learned by serving in this time is that serving in a time of crisis, I believe, is far more rewarding than serving in normal times. And it's rewarding because you can really make a difference. There is no time like the president to do the job.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The provost is number two officer of the university and the chief academic officer. At Harvard, it's a relatively new role. There was a provost briefly at the end of World War II because President Conan was in Washington and the provost kind of ran the university. Very temporary arrangement. But it really started in modern times in 1991. It's a job that expanded pretty much monotonically over time. And when I took on the job, the Provost was responsible for all of the inner faculty initiatives. The deans reported to both the president and the provost. And the provost had a huge role in faculty appointments and promotions.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think a lot of people in this audience know Drew Faust, and let me just tell you she's a very persuasive person. And I was chair of the committee to visit the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine. That's how I met Drew. And it brought me back here. And it was through that that I met her and she asked me if I'd be interested in looking at the job of provost when it opened up. My initial answer was no. But somehow she got me to change”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a great experience studying economics at Harvard. I had done enough of the graduate courses at Harvard that I could shorten the time it took to get a PhD. And what I learned in the applications process is that other PhD programs would not recognize, they would not give me credit for the Harvard courses.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I may sound like I'm bragging. There are a lot of alumni here in the audience, and I bet every one of them is proud of their class. But here, let me brag about my classmates. The person whose face was beneath mine in the freshman Facebook was Bill Gates.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That drew upon a document called the University Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which was created in the early 70s that outlined how we protect, protest, but also enabled the members of our community to carry on their work without disruption. So we provided some clarity there. For anti-Semitism and also for the complaints that we heard about anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian incidents, I created two presidential task forces to study the issues and make a set of recommendations. Both of those task forces took their work very seriously. It took a lot of time, but they gathered data, they did hundreds upon hundreds of interviews, and then they came up with a very lengthy set of recommendations, which we have implemented. We're well on the way to implement.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done a lot to address these issues, and one of the challenges we face from the beginning concerning the protests is that people claimed that our rules were unclear, what's permissible in a protest. And so one of the first things we did is to develop a set of guidelines, basically.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For many programs, there is a lot of hesitancy about attending college or attending graduate school in the US because of uncertainty about visa status and whether that could be taken away. At the same time, this year, we've had a lot of success and the students who were actually admitted virtually from other countries virtually all of them have been able to attend. So it's too early to have a confident answer to your question, but we are worried. And I want to say one other thing. They aren't strictly speaking students, but postdocs, that is, the postdoctoral fellows who work in our labs, in the hospitals, and in other parts of the university, there is some evidence that fewer of them are applying for jobs in the U.S.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we had announced in the first official communication upon the release of the Supreme Court's decision that we would adhere to the law, not change our values and principles, but we would certainly adhere to the law. The specific measures that we've taken have been many. We've made sure that in the admissions process, nobody involved in making a decision about admissions has access to the check the box, what's your race, what's your ethnicity.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say it's all of the above, but I would also say that we have had over the past many decades a relentless focus on attracting the best talent in the entire world. It takes resources, but the resources are not only financial. The resources are human resources, and we have done an amazing job in attracting great talent from all of the world. So that combination is what enabled the U.S. to be so successful.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the post war period and actually during the war and just before the war, largely European scientists. That combination made the US the world leader in science and technology.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The period that you're referring to was really set into motion by a report by Venever Bush who had written a book called The Endless Frontier, and he argued that it would be more efficient for the federal government to support research by working with universities than pursuing more of a European-style model where there would be independent research institutes. The federal government would pay for everything. That's what's set in motion. What became a real boom in innovation and science and technology in the United States. I would add that in addition to the funding that went to universities to conduct research, the country benefited from an influx of immigrants who are some of the greatest scientists in the world, largely at”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The endowments clearly is a substantial text, particularly for universities like Harvard that are expected to be in the top tier. And of course it's damaging because, for example, so much of our financial aid, the scholarships that we give our students are funded through the endowment. And it funds the research. It funds all kinds of activities in the university. So yes, it's quite damaging. In terms of addressing the problems that we are accused of and that I believe was part of the rationale for passing the endowment tax, the tax is only going to make it harder to address these issues. Not easier.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, the endowment is a very important source of revenue. One thing that is important to realize about the endowment is that it's heavily restricted. So, for example, we have funds to pay for individual professorships. We have funds that are dedicated to a particular research center, funds of that kind. They cannot be used for other purposes. So that's one restriction that makes it very hard to treat this like some giant piggy bank where we can take out funds when we need them on a rainy day. There's a second consideration as well, which is that most of the terms under which people gave money for the endowment include an obligation that this should be sustainable. And what that really means is that future generations should have access to this.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a long period in which we did not have the funding, and the Central University used its resources to help the investigators continue at least some of their work, not all of the work could be funded by the university and the schools that are part of the university. What's important to recognize is that there was very critical work that could not be stopped, but we could not really afford to make up for all of the lost money from the federal government.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we were performing at the behest of the federal government. We were fulfilling our obligations under the terms of the grants and contracts that the federal government issued.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can only tell you a little bit about the status of the case except what's publicly known, which is that we received a favorable judgment in district court. And I think you're referring to the lawsuit in which we alleged First Amendment violations as well as procedural violations by the federal government when they cut off our funding. We sued because they cut off our funding. We should be very clear about that. It was done in a precipitous manner without any real process. We really had no choice because we had hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and I want to point out one other thing. This was not in the form of gifts or subsidies. It was payment for research.”
2025-10-23 · The David Rubenstein Show · Alan M. Garber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source