​Harvard’s Moral Education Is Insufficient

At what point in your Harvard education do you learn to serve someone other than yourself?

What General Education requirement ensures that students prioritize values like compassion and humility? Which school mantra, tradition, song, or mission statement implores you to sacrifice self-interest for charity?

How, in general, do Harvard kids learn to be good people and not just powerful ones?

For me, these are tricky questions because there are no concrete answers. Harvard may provide the most rigorous academic education in the world, but in a structural sense—in the way the college builds communities and manages traditions—it hardly provides a moral education.

This shortcoming is especially dangerous for an institution that pumps out so many influential figures. From John Adams to John F. Kennedy, five presidents have gone through the undergraduate program, more than any other college. Harvard has dished out a total of 65 degrees to Fortune 500 CEOs; the closest competitor is Stanford, which has awarded 27.

It’s no exaggeration to say that every year, Harvard educates people who will change the world. Surely the college ought to mount a gale-force effort to strengthen the integrity of these students—to motivate future leaders to lead in the right direction.

Instead, Harvard as an institution has refused to make moral education a defining feature of the undergraduate experience. In particular the university lacks a well-publicized set of life values, has no administrative program intended to strengthen the empathy of students, and does little to persuade the undergraduate body to use its prodigious gifts for a just purpose.

The sort of moral education that I have in mind requires an atmosphere that is saturated with compassionate values. Values like an impulse to serve the interests of others; a broad recognition of common humanity despite surface-level differences; a willingness to love before being loved.

How do you create this atmosphere? The simplest and most effective way is by formulating a clear set of moral stances, such as “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and repeating them frequently enough until people start to internalize them and live through imitation.

Well, I’ve spent a year as an undergraduate, and I still have no idea what basic ethical principles underpin my education at Harvard.

Before searching on the Internet, for instance, I didn’t know that my college had a stated mission. This hidden text spends most of the time discussing “intellectual transformation” and admits only a lukewarm hope that students will be “learning how they can best serve the world.”

By contrast, I do know the lyrics to “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard.” This song details sporting conquests and instills absolutely nothing besides bravado. Not a bad attitude if you’ve just won your eighth straight game, but hardly a philosophy to order your life.

I also know the motto of my school: “Veritas.” It’s a powerful reminder that I’m participating in a millennia-long struggle for understanding. It also says nothing about kindness.

After one year and countless orientation sessions, I can remember only a handful of times that Harvard administrators reminded me that charity matters. I’ve been listening, but I still don’t understand exactly how my college plans to shape me into a more loving person.

In place of the institution, my friends have filled this role. Any moral growth that I have experienced has come through interactions with them—talking through issues with them, watching them care about other students, remembering to do the same myself.

This isn’t good enough. I’m attending college in the hopes of developing into a more rounded person; growing in love and humility is as much a part of this development as growing in wisdom.

Besides creating and reinforcing a set of university-wide maxims, Harvard administrators could, in their regular outreach to students, stress the importance of taking care of others, not just yourself. Too often this message only appears in the aftermath of a tragedy.

More basically the University could stand tall and stick to the position that there are right ways to use a Harvard degree, and there are wrong ways. Part of going to a place like this one is figuring out how to untangle your educational privilege.

Perhaps there are reasons that Harvard doesn’t take on a more active role as a promoter of morality. After all, the college aims to teach critical inquiry and active questioning, which may seem antithetical to aphoristic propaganda.

But this logic lacks the understanding that humble service is a universal virtue. Championing kindness doesn’t undermine analytical thinking; it doesn’t offend diversity.

There are lots of mistakes you can make at Harvard—drinking too much, studying too little, or picking the wrong extracurriculars—but the only way you can truly fail is to abandon compassion.

This is a message that all college students ought to hear again and again, but Harvard’s administration has failed to deliver it.

Sam Danello '18, an editorial writer, lives in Leverett House