Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
As we begin the spring semester, I write with gratitude for the progress we have made in advancing our mission and confidence in our path forward.
The past two years tested us. We confronted fundamental questions about our values and actions—how we combat hatred while protecting free expression, ensure genuine viewpoint diversity, and create environments where challenging ideas can be debated, not suppressed. We had hard conversations and made real changes. Most of you witnessed our progress directly, and many of you contributed to it in important ways. That work continues, and as many of you have told me, it is having a tangible impact. Now it’s time to focus with renewed energy on what brought us here: striving for academic excellence, pursuing knowledge that matters, and educating leaders who will use it wisely.
A Strong Foundation
The success of our efforts is grounded in the strength of our foundation. We continue to nurture learning environments in which we collect and analyze evidence with greater sophistication and rigor, and we explore and test ideas more fully through constructive debate. Harvard College, along with the graduate and professional Schools, continues to expand programs to promote campus discourse. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Classroom Social Compact Committee is championing norms that facilitate both free expression and effective learning. To support and sustain this excellence, we are diversifying funding sources and pursuing efficiencies throughout the University. Financial prudence enables us to provide the resources needed to support the boldest work and the best minds as we strive to break down financial barriers to a Harvard education.
A Critical Moment
We are living through a period of extraordinary scientific discovery and technological innovation. Examples abound at Harvard: groundbreaking research that protects human health, including disease surveillance and genome editing; technological feats like quantum error correction that bring vast computing power closer to practical use; applications of artificial intelligence that accelerate discovery in nearly every area of inquiry; and many more achievements that inspire wonder and hope. The vast array of fields and disciplines in which our work pushes the frontiers of knowledge never fails to astound me, nor does our commitment to teaching and learning. We are continually experimenting and now innovating with the help of generative AI tools, opening exciting avenues for exploration that remind us why it is imperative to learn as we teach and to teach as we learn.
The questions facing humanity—from the future of governance to the challenges of climate change, from the promises and perils of automation to the persistence of illness and disease—demand exactly the kind of ambitious, boundary-crossing work that Harvard does so well. How can society ensure that democratic institutions and norms remain resilient in the face of division and turmoil around the world? What will editing genes and identifying the underpinnings and control of inflammation enable and accelerate in medicine? Can our understanding of neurodegeneration and our approach to its prevention and treatment outpace aging populations? And, threaded through each of these questions, what does it mean to live together, to treat each other with dignity, and to be human in a time of rapid and unsettling change?
Every day, in every corner of the University, we ask questions worth asking and seek answers that are consequential. Our sacrifices—the difficult conversations, the late nights, the failed experiments, the bets that don’t pay off—are less burdens than beacons, urging us onward to breakthroughs. Pushing forward now, at a moment when so much is at stake and so much more is becoming possible, must be our highest priority.
A Widening Reach
No institution can solve the hardest problems alone. As we seek to accelerate both basic research and the translation of discoveries into solutions, we must strengthen collaborations with other colleges, universities, research organizations, and industry partners, expanding and magnifying our contributions not only in research but also in teaching. Pedagogical insights and innovations should be disseminated widely. Extending educational excellence through online platforms, lifelong learning programs, and workforce development initiatives can benefit learners everywhere, and make one of our greatest strengths as an institution more available to all.
Reaching our goals reaffirms that rigorous inquiry combined with genuine openness to different perspectives produces better answers; that disagreement, pursued seriously and generously, leads to truth more reliably than an unquestioned consensus; that institutions dedicated to knowledge and learning, for their own sake and for the benefit of humanity, remain essential to democracy and human flourishing.
Ten years from now, we will celebrate the 400th anniversary of our founding—enough time to ensure that Harvard remains clear-sighted and sure-footed for its next century of achievement. I am optimistic about our future because I see devotion to a vital mission every day in faculty who do not settle for easy answers, in students who challenge us to think differently, in staff who make everything work, in alumni and friends whose support makes the whole enterprise possible, in each of us who calls Harvard home. My confidence in the University rests in you. Thank you for your dedication to our community and its mission.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber