Harvard selects current interim president to serve as president through 2027

Alan Garber was selected as interim president after former President Claudine Gay stepped down in January and will serve until 2027.

Harvard University’s interim President Alan Garber has been selected to serve as the school’s official president for the next three years, the Harvard Corporation said.

Garber was named interim in january after the high-profile resignation of former President Claudine Gay following criticism over alleged anti-semitism on campus and allegations of plagiarism in her work.

He will stay in the role through the 2026-2027 school year. Harvard said they will launch their search for his successor in the late spring or summer of 2026.

Garber, an economist and physician, served as provost and chief academic officer of Harvard for 12 years. Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, said Garber has already “done an outstanding job leading Harvard through extraordinary challenges.”

“We have asked him to hold the title of president, not just interim president, both to recognize his distinguished service to the University and to underscore our belief that this is a time not merely for steady stewardship but for active, engaged leadership,” Pritzker wrote, representing the university’s governing boards.

Since Garber has taken over operations, Harvard has made the decision to no longer make public statements on political and social issues. In June, Harvard also announced employee applicants for university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will no longer need to submit statements about their plan to advance “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

Those changes came after a tumultuous year for the Ivy League school. Gay represented Harvard at a congressional hearing on antisemitism in December where she answered questions about protecting Jewish students since the October attacks in Israel.

During questioning by a Republican lawmaker about whether calls for the genocide of Jews — inferred through the use of the term “intifada” — would violate the university’s code of conduct, Gay said it would depend on the context and later apologized. Gay and the university resisted initial calls for her to step down, but her resignation came a month later.

With Garber at the helm, later in January, the university announced task forces to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The university then later made headlines with an encampment on Harvard Yard, which Harvard initially resisted by blocking access to the green space. The tents stayed for 20 days from April into May, and 13 students were initially withheld degrees for their involvement. Harvard later awarded 11 of those students their degrees.

In his own statement, Garber acknowledged the “challenging time” Harvard is facing.

“I know that we are capable of finding our way forward together because we share a devotion to learning and because we recognize our pluralism as a source of our strength,” Garber wrote.