Wonder served him well

Before becoming Harvard’s 31st president, Alan Garber served as provost and chief academic officer for more than 12 years, a role that gave him an expansive view and an intimate understanding of the teaching and research that define the University’s mission. The lessons of that experience have stayed with him.

Garber’s Harvard roots run deep, starting with his arrival in the early 1970s as a freshman from Rock Island, Illinois. After graduating in three years, he went on to earn two advanced degrees: A Harvard Ph.D. in economics and an M.D. at Stanford University. That was immediately followed by internal medicine training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he met his future wife. He returned to Stanford, where he spent the next 25 years as a teacher, researcher, and VA physician.

In this edited interview, Garber notes that he’d never aspired to a top post in higher education before President Drew Faust called to gauge his interest in the provost’s job. Years later, when he stepped into the presidency, he was once again pushing the boundaries he’d imagined for himself. But in both cases, he says, Harvard had given him too much for the answer to be anything but a wholehearted “Yes.”

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