Dr. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, disagrees with President Trump about many things. He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its nonprofit tax status.

But Dr. Garber agrees with Mr. Trump on one point. In one of the rare interviews he has given since Harvard began its battle with the federal government, Dr. Garber said this week that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing.

Harvard has often shut out voices that many liberals disagree with, he said, and it has allowed antisemitism to go unchecked.

“The issue for me was not principally whether we had problems that we needed to address,” Dr. Garber said in a lengthy interview in Washington.

The problem is the Trump administration’s methods, which are growing more aggressive by the day. Last month, Trump officials said they would cut more than $2 billion in federal funds intended for the university, to force it to comply with a series of demands Harvard says violate the First Amendment. On Friday, Mr. Trump escalated the attack, saying the Internal Revenue Service would take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status, threatening many millions more.

To Dr. Garber, defending and reforming Harvard is not a provincial matter. Americans are questioning a higher education system that many see as disconnected from their values. He believes deep funding cuts would impair the kind of innovative work that has made American research universities the global engine for scientific discovery since World War II.

“This is genuinely unprecedented,” Dr. Garber said in the interview.

“We have so many challenges ahead and we also have so many opportunities,” he said, adding, “this is a time when we should be doubling down on our investments in research, particularly in science.”

An Unlikely Resistance Leader

Dr. Garber earned three degrees from Harvard before moving to California to study to become a medical doctor at Stanford University. He was there for a quarter-century, studying health policy, raising four children and serving as a physician at the nearby Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

He never planned to be a college administrator, or to leave California.

Now Dr. Garber is Harvard’s president during an unprecedented crisis. And some Democrats, frustrated and forlorn at a lack of leadership in their own ranks, have embraced him as a hero. They celebrated when Dr. Garber penned an aggressive rebuttal to an intrusive list of Trump administration demands last month and then sued the administration.

In a recent message to the Harvard community, Dr. Garber vowed to keep fighting federal intrusion.

But all along, Dr. Garber has been clear — subtly but insistently — that he shares some of the same concerns about Harvard the Trump administration has.

“We still have much work to do,” he has written.

The White House has said Harvard should not receive federal money if Jewish students are targeted and harassed on its campus. “The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enrich their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families, is coming to an end,” a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said last month.

In the eyes of Mr. Trump and many Republicans, Harvard and other elite American universities have become echo chambers — places where students develop intolerance for political perspectives different from their own and shield themselves from ideas they find objectionable.

University leaders often say that criticism exaggerates the issue, claiming that critics want to perpetuate “woke” caricatures of university culture in order to win elections.

But at the same time, many university leaders also worry that Americans have lost trust in academia and no longer see as much value in a college education as they once did. About a third of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup poll published last year, up from 10 percent a decade earlier.

Some of Dr. Garber’s most notable decisions during the 16 months he has led the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university have focused on shifting that culture. Under his leadership, Harvard changed how it handles student discipline, manages protests, hires faculty members, challenges antisemitism and weighs in on public controversies.

Dr. Garber has called antisemitism a “serious problem” at Harvard. “It is present on our campus,” he said in March and added that, as a Jew, he had experienced it himself.

In recent days, he also rolled back policies related to diversity and race, for example, ending university support of graduations for various student groups, including Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. students.

“The last few years have been a wake-up call,” said Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor who has warned that his university and other elite institutions have devalued intellectual and ideological diversity at considerable cost to their reputations.

He praised Dr. Garber for recognizing what many other academic leaders have not — at least in public: The Trump administration had not made “an unreasonable request” when it said Harvard must consistently enforce its rules against disruptive demonstrations and swiftly punish antisemitic harassment.

“He’s got principles and courage, to say something about an issue that had not been adequately confronted before,” Dr. Pinker said.

As he has moved to make more changes, he has also faced pushback. Harvard students, writing in an essay in the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, suggested the changes to diversity programs “might be politically expedient for now.”

“But it will not solve Harvard’s public relations crisis,” they went on, adding, “The way to win against authoritarian attacks isn’t by prioritizing optics — it’s by standing up for our values.”

Fixing Broken Systems

As a health care economist, Dr. Garber focused on some of the American health care system’s most stubborn problems, publishing 129 papers in 25 years.

His questions were probing. And he was unbothered by delivering answers people might not like.

Why does the federal government allow companies to charge what they want for drugs discovered and developed with research paid for by the federal government?

Why can’t we know what our medical bill will be before it arrives? It’s like going to a restaurant and getting a menu without prices, he said.

A fast runner, Dr. Garber trained for and raced in marathons. Once, he spent hours recovering from an injury by running in a pool, listening to “War and Peace” for entertainment. Four months later, he ran a marathon with a time of 3 hours 36 minutes.

In 2011, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, wanted Dr. Garber to be her new provost, the university’s chief academic officer. She had seen him interact on a medical school committee and was impressed by his ability to retain a quiet equanimity and bring about consensus. It was a trait that would serve him well, colleagues said, as the person responsible for interacting with Harvard deans, department heads and professors on a daily basis.

“He had a calm, ethical voice,” Dr. Faust said in an interview.

Repeatedly, she asked him to be provost. Repeatedly, he said no. He relented after he inquired about the job and heard something that appealed to him: It would focus on helping others succeed.

“It’s like this lightbulb went off, and I thought, you know, I’m at a stage in my career where I get much more pleasure out of seeing the people I mentor succeed than me getting another honor or paper accepted,” he said.

He discovered he really liked the job. “You’re deeply embedded in the academic life of the university, ” Dr. Garber said. “And I love that.”

Twelve and a half years passed by, periods of political and social upheaval that transformed higher education, including a Black Lives Matter movement that brought new attention to diversity on campus and a fight over affirmative action that took Harvard to the Supreme Court.

Even before the protests over the war in Gaza, people who have worked with Dr. Garber at Harvard said that he had expressed disappointment with a political climate on campus that could be intolerant of dissent.

“I think that troubled him a lot, actually,” said Robert E. Rubin, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a former long-serving member of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s powerful governing body. “Because he felt that universities should be a place for exchanging all views, as opposed to a place where people exclude certain views. And I happen to agree with that.”

Mr. Rubin recalled one conversation in which Dr. Garber stressed the importance of ideological diversity in higher education. “He said he believed that one of the problems we faced was a conformity of views, and the tendency on the part of some people to suppress contrary views,” Mr. Rubin said.

The Presidency in a Time of War

After over a dozen years as provost, Dr. Garber had decided it was time to return to teaching. A new president, Claudine Gay, took over in 2023. Dr. Garber hoped to leave administrative work by the end of the year.

But within months, Dr. Gay was forced out over her handling of accusations of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. Dr. Garber had to change his plans.

“The provost is basically a partner to the president, and I probably knew about as much about the job as a person could know without being president,” he said in the interview.

He thought he would stay only until Harvard found a permanent president and would then take a sabbatical. But the list of problems confronting him was long, and growing.

He wanted to clarify rules around protests, and when the university should make public statements, for example. Harvard did not often speak out on issues beyond the campus, “but the policy had not been consistently followed,” he explained. Yet, he added, “we were getting demands from groups in every direction to make statements.”

Prominent faculty members and alumni were also concerned that Harvard had become a “national joke,” as Dr. Pinker, the psychology professor, put it.

The number of early admissions applicants to Harvard had plummeted.

Donors were skittish and angry, and vocal about their frustration with the university.

And one influential free speech advocacy organization ranked Harvard last in its annual survey of 200 institutions.

That spring, Harvard began unraveling policies that Dr. Garber and others believed had fueled some of its political problems. It adopted a policy stating that the university would not issue official statements about issues that did not affect its core functions. Its largest academic division said it would no longer require job applicants to attest in writing their commitment to diversity.

Summer came, and students went home. The tent city that pro-Palestinian students had erected in the Harvard Yard came down after Dr. Garber helped bring about a peaceful end to weeks of student demonstrations.

But many in academia worried that protests would strike up again in the fall. And the list of changes that Dr. Garber wanted to see through was still quite long.

“At some point, all of us in leadership and the corporation decided that this was a lot for an interim president to do,” Dr. Garber said.

On Aug. 2, 2024, the Harvard corporation made Dr. Garber the president through the 2026-27 academic year.

Trump Strikes

During Mr. Trump’s first term as president, education had often seemed like an afterthought. Soon after he returned to office in January, it became clear his second term would be focused on bringing academia to heel.

Initially, Dr. Garber tried not to antagonize the new president.

After the Trump administration said in March that it was reviewing $9 billion in grants and contracts because Harvard had not done enough to stop antisemitism on campus, Dr. Garber’s response was hardly a manifesto of Trump resistance.

He noted in a message to the Harvard community the steps the university was taking to address the administration’s concerns. He also vowed to cooperate with the federal task force on antisemitism.

On campus, many were pushing him to be more aggressive, and not to negotiate.

He was doing no such thing, he said in the interview. He had simply offered to explain all that Harvard had been doing already, and what else it had planned.

But the administration’s next sally shocked him. It came in the form of an email that arrived late on April 11. It had a list of demands, including allowing the federal government to review hiring decisions, examine admissions decisions and audit the student body, the faculty and the staff to be sure they represented a variety of viewpoints.

Three days later, Harvard published a scathing letter written by Dr. Garber. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote.

With that Friday night letter, Dr. Garber added, “they had gone too far.”

“We don’t question appropriate regulation,” he said in the interview. But this appeared to violate the Constitution.

Saving the University

Since that moment, Dr. Garber has been hailed as a defender of academic independence. He has led Harvard in a lawsuit that claims the Trump administration has no legal authority to demand such sweeping changes to the way the university operates.

Not everyone sees his resistance as heroic.

“What this celebration has missed,” two Harvard Ph.D. students wrote in an article for The Nation, “is that Harvard has been quietly complying with Trump’s agenda for weeks.”

In recent days, Dr. Garber released a report outlining problems with both antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus, apologized for both issues and promised more changes.

He has also gone beyond the focus on antisemitism, taking on the hotly contested issue of race and diversity.

Three years ago, Harvard fought all the way to the Supreme Court to maintain an admissions system that considered students’ racial backgrounds, arguing that admitting students of different backgrounds and experiences was essential to providing a well-rounded education.

Last month, Dr. Garber wrote in a public message that Harvard was “adopting important adjustments to the ways we build community,” suggesting that the university “focus on individuals and their unique characteristics rather than their race.”

In a speech, Caleb Thompson, Harvard’s undergraduate student body president, criticized the university’s decision to eliminate graduation celebrations for affinity groups.

“To the Garber administration for the decision that was made to shut down affinity graduations and attack affinity spaces here on campus, my message is this: ‘This was not what you promised when you said you would stand up against the Trump administration,’” Mr. Thompson said.

Dr. Garber’s defenders say he is making moves to preserve the integrity of the university. “He really is doing this as the servant leader,” Dr. Faust said. “This is not about Alan’s greater glory.”

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, said that he believed Dr. Garber understood the high stakes involved — not just for Harvard but for all of American higher education.

“I believe he is aware of the moment in time,” he said. “He is aware of what needs to be done. He is aware of his important role in getting those things done. He has a huge fraction of the community behind him.”

Dr. Garber’s approach — trying to reform the university while protecting it from attack — is not without risk.

But as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on Harvard, many on campus seem to have looked past their differences, more united than they have been in years as they face the threat outside their gates.

Asked about the end game, Dr. Garber said his goal was not specific to Harvard. It is, he said, “to ensure that universities in the U.S. can contribute to the nation in the ways we’ve always intended to.”

Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

With its horse-trodden roads, endless fields of almond blossoms and cowboy heritage, the 20,000 person town of Oakdale, Calif., fits the American West of imagination. And for decades, its media diet was classically all-American, too.

Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even had two media outlets dedicated to rodeo and horse roping news.

But that version of Oakdale is a thing of the past.

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

By the 2024 election, when its county, Stanislaus, was among the 10 in California that President Trump flipped red, it wasn’t just trust in traditional media that had vanished from Oakdale — it was the media itself.

Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

Of the 80 Oakdale residents The New York Times spoke to for this article, not a single one subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.

Oakdale is not alone: Between news deserts expanding in rural areas and a growing distrust of national outlets, the town’s shift toward new sources of information is becoming commonplace in small communities across the country. That trend is almost certain to accelerate, with the Trump administration moving to claw back funding for NPR and PBS, which would slash local broadcasting stations’ budgets, and prioritizing hyperpartisan “new media” in the White House press briefings.

But seeking truth in a post-journalism world of Facebook groups and online influencers has left some Oakdale residents feeling less informed than before. And efforts to manage misinformation that culminated in an armed militia storming the town in 2020 have changed the very nature of the community.

The Cowboy Capital of the World

Tucked between mountain ranges and rivers in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Oakdale is only 100 miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area, but it has the feel of another world.

It’s a place where the highways are dotted with fruit stands and neighbors leave baked goods on one another’s porches, with a large community of Latino immigrants and a proud cowboy history, memorialized in two separate museums. During the pandemic, the town became especially tight-knit, bonded by the uncertainty of the virus, the politics of an election year and the hardship of closing down restaurants and retail stores in a place where small businesses are an economic lifeblood.

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

With residents stuck at home during the pandemic, the groups thrived. But as new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections.

Then, the militia incident happened.

Julie Logan, an in-home health care worker in Oakdale, can still remember the scene: It was a weekend morning in June, and the downtown farmers’ market had been replaced by a scene resembling a military operation.

Gunmen patrolled the sidewalks dressed head to toe in brown camouflage; store windows were boarded up; some of the men perched from the rooftops in tactical gear, brandishing rifles.

The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment.

They waited and waited. But the protesters never came.

The men were drawn to Oakdale by a false rumor spread in a Facebook group called All Things Oakdale, which over the years had become the town’s primary forum for local news. Started in 2015 by Ms. Logan, the group had amassed more than 17,000 members by 2020.

“That was the moment we knew something had to change,” she said. “We were overwhelmed.”

The militia was hired by the owner of a downtown bar called the H-B Saloon, the police said. The scene confused even the local authorities, and Jeff Dirkse, the sheriff of Stanislaus County, took to Facebook to decry “rumors that are running rampant on social media,” but assured residents there was no threat of an attack. (Reached by phone, the owner of H-B declined to comment.)

Ms. Logan made the Facebook group private and banned political discussions altogether. To help with fact-checking and moderation, she enlisted Kari Conversa, a pet care store owner, and Christopher Smith, an Oakdale City Council member and commercial plumbing distribution manager.

But the new focus on moderation had an unintended effect: Frustrated residents whose comments were removed began to create their own groups in protest, with names like Oakdale Incident Feed First Amendment Approved and Oakdale Incident Feed UNFILTERED. Soon enough, the spinoffs were becoming more popular than the original group.

Toni Ahrens, a wood carving artist, started Oakdale Incident Feed DOUBLE UNFILTERED after “experiencing the filtering first hand,” when a moderator removed a political comment of hers. Her new group now has 9,500 members — three times the number of subscribers of Oakdale’s weekly newspaper.

But Ms. Ahrens acknowledged that certain administrators have prioritized the kinds of misinformation and political discussions that caused them to be banned in the first place. And, more often than not, these residents lean conservative.

Among the largest of these Facebook groups is Stanislaus News, which has 75,000 members and has become the go-to source of information for crime in the area. (The sprawling county has around 500,000 residents.)

The group was founded by Mark Davis, a former bail bonds salesman in the nearby city of Modesto who was himself banned from a different group dedicated to local news in 2019. Along with his wife, Mr. Davis spends hours a day monitoring local police and emergency services scanners, translating the radio codes into updates that are often posted hours ahead of local news reports.

The group has also become a repository for Mr. Davis’s personal musings about Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s so called Department of Government Efficiency, to the frustration of many residents who just want to read about local happenings.

“THIS PAGE WAS NOT INTENDED FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES,” one commenter wrote on a recent post about Mr. Musk.

The group is closely aligned with the Modesto Police Department, which uses it to make daily posts of its own. “This is a PRO law enforcement group,” reads one of Mr. Davis’s rules. “If you are not, then this is not the group for you.”

Some residents say Mr. Davis’s rules have hurt their efforts to spread important news, like in December, when surveillance footage posted to the group of a fatal shooting at a convenience store appeared to contradict the sheriff’s report of how the altercation began. Members of the group began to post new details about the case — until Mr. Davis stepped in to ban them.

Blake Coronado, who runs a nonprofit that helps find missing people and relies on Facebook groups for engagement, was one of the members who posted. After visiting the crime scene in person to share his findings, Mr. Coronado said, comments on his post were disabled within minutes. A day later, he was banned.

“I was shocked, because to my knowledge we didn’t even break any rules,” he said in an interview. “If we’re not going to hold our police department accountable, how is that helping our community?”

Mr. Davis and the Modesto Police Department did not respond to requests for comments.

Local news around Oakdale hasn’t always been this way. In the early 2000s, the Modesto Bee, the largest regional paper owned by the newspaper chain McClatchy, had over a hundred reporters; it now has around a dozen. Both of its former rodeo and horse roping news outlets are now out of business.

The town is still able to support a weekly newspaper called The Oakdale Leader, which shares a handful of reporters with nine other local newspapers in the Central Valley, all owned by Hank Vander Veen, its publisher and a former circulation director at the Modesto Bee.

“We’re not trying to compete with it,” Mr. Vander Veen said of the Facebook groups in an interview. “I still feel like some people go to us, whether it’s our website or our newspaper, for a more trusted news.”

‘Now the News Comes From Everywhere’

It isn’t just local news habits that are changing in Oakdale. Since the pandemic, a wider skepticism for everything including vaccines and the price of eggs has changed the way people approach information in general: The thinking is, do your own research, and trust neither side.

Fred Smith, a gun store owner in Oakdale, grew up watching broadcasts of the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite when he was called “the most trusted man in America.” Until recently, he was a regular viewer of CNN and Fox News after work and estimates he spent over $100,000 advertising his store in the print pages of the Modesto Bee in the early 2000s.

But that trust has waned as traditional cable outlets have started to feel “more like entertainment than news,” he said. He’s gravitated toward podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a fellow veteran. But he doesn’t necessarily trust all the information on those podcasts, either.

“It used to be you had one source of news and you trusted it,” Mr. Smith said. “Now the news comes from everywhere, and I take it all with a grain of salt.”

He now finds himself inundated with “more news than he’s ever felt in his lifetime” in the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, and he doesn’t trust any of it. Asked if he ever gets his news from social media, Mr. Smith opened his Instagram feed to show an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump riding a bald eagle. “You can’t trust that either,” he said.

Alternative news in Oakdale has even extended into print. In barber shops, clock repair stores and diners across town, copies of a peculiar newspaper appear on tables and bookshelves: The Epoch Times.

The media outlet is affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, and it is known to include right-wing misinformation with an anti-China slant. (The outlet did not respond to a request for comment.) A weekly print subscription costs less than $15 a year, but most store owners in Oakdale said they didn’t initially pay for a subscription — the editions just started showing up in the mail during the pandemic.

Beatriz Ortega, a hairdresser in Oakdale, first came across The Epoch Times in the summer of 2020, when free copies arrived at the door of her barbershop. Her husband, John, enjoyed the reporting, so he purchased a subscription. The outlet’s reporting, Mr. Ortega said, “feels straightforward enough,” and the paper has in recent years added a California news section.

The Ortegas’ news habits couldn’t be more different. Ms. Ortega keeps up with current events exclusively through La Mesa Caliente, a Spanish-language talk show on Telemundo hosted by four women. Mr. Ortega gets his news from an orbit of right-wing male YouTube personalities like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino, who was recently named deputy director of the F.B.I.

Their differing news diets can often become points of contention, Mr. Ortega said, when it feels like they’re getting information about the same events from entirely different worlds. “But we both just want the facts,” he said.

Sarah Jones, 35, who works at a retail store downtown, said her attitude toward the media changed along with her beliefs about health and wellness in 2018, when she had her first child and began to distrust conventional medical advice.

By 2020, she had gotten rid of her television, replacing cable news programs like CNN and Fox News with mostly female news influencers on Instagram who aggregate the news into short video clips and graphics.

One of the accounts Ms. Jones follows, House Inhabit, is run by Jessica Reed-Kraus, a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fan who Mr. Trump recently added to the White House press pool. Others accounts she follows like Real News No Bullshit are managed anonymously.

Working alongside Mr. Smith at his gun store is Jimmy Freeman, 50, who is known around the shop as a news hound. But whatever trust Mr. Freeman had in mainstream media disappeared while watching the last Biden-Trump presidential debate.

Watching President Biden struggle to string together complete sentences, he couldn’t help but think that the press corps in Washington that was supposed to keep the country informed — including Oakdale — had let him down.

“It felt like a failure,” Mr. Freeman said. “How could the media not tell us what we were seeing?”

His solution to what he saw as media bias was a website called Ground News, which aggregates reports from different news outlets and gives them each a bias score on the spectrum of left, center and right, along with a “factuality” rating. Users can even toggle between A.I. generated summaries of news stories written from different political perspectives.

“You grab both sides, bring them toward the middle, and that’s usually where the truth is,” Mr. Freeman said. At $8 a month, it is the only news subscription he pays for.

Some Old News Diets Remain

Liberal residents in Oakdale say their news diets haven’t changed as much as their conservative counterparts. Harvey Melgoza, 67, still listens to MSNBC on the radio while working at his shoe repair store downtown, like he has for as long as he can remember. And he will sometimes read The Oakdale Leader on the occasion that his neighbor, Doug, drops off extra copies at his doorstep.

Since the start of the pandemic, he has watched some of his neighbors embrace conspiracy theories, or grow suddenly fearful of Mexican immigrants coming across the border.

MSNBC “might sometimes have a bias,” he said, “but at least it gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world.”

On April 5, dozens of Oakdale residents prepared to protest Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk in Modesto, among the hundreds of protests happening that day around the country.

Fliers with details of the event were being deleted from Facebook groups, so they turned to email threads to share information instead. Marjorie Sturdy, a therapist in Oakdale and the leader of the town’s progressive club, drove to the protest that day with a pit of anxiety in her stomach, remembering the militia five years ago.

Then came some relief — the Modesto Police assured her, in private, that it was monitoring Facebook for dangerous threats. Aside from a few angry passers-by, the rally drew hundreds and went on as planned.

“It gave me some optimism,” Ms. Sturdy said, “that things could change.”

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.