Harvard’s Paradox of Exclusive Inclusivity

Prominent Harvard speakers and community members convened last week for the 2023 Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Forum, themed “Reckoning and Transformation.” In the quest for “healing, restoration, and accountability,” this forum aimed to “elevate and prioritize truth-seeking and reckoning with our past in order to more fully understand our history and actions.”

Despite such ambitious aspirations to amplify Harvard’s institutional and systematic approach to diversity, one thing feels missing from the campus discussion of social justice: our role as society’s most privileged few.

We are told from the day we open our acceptance letters that Harvard is home — that we belong. But for the vast majority of applicants, let alone people, Harvard will never be home.

Harvard has made strides in improving racial diversity on campus, with consistently growing proportions of non-white students in each class year. However, our student body continues to hail from disproportionate wealth, with over two-thirds of Harvard students coming from the top fifth of the income distribution. Over half of Harvard students come from families in the top tenth of income earners, and nearly two-fifths of students in the top five percent. And more than one in every seven Harvard students comes from a family in the top one percent earning more than $630,000 every year.

These numbers should force us to acknowledge a fundamental paradox in our home. We imagine it to be a beacon of equity and inclusion; at the same time, we enjoy its benefits out of an inherently hyper-elite and privileged position.

I will not speak for anyone else’s experience at Harvard, and my intention is not to criticize any individual. Rather, I question how our community appears so hypersensitive to the inclusivity of one of the world’s most exclusive bubbles. Each of us, many on the basis of wealth or familial connection, has been granted rare access into this space. And yet we debate inclusivity without any accountability, lacking any urgency to understand our own privileges as beneficiaries of this hyper-elite institution.

The quest for diversity at a campus like Harvard may forever be constrained by the fact that, if unchanged, our institution will never reflect the society in which we live. For some, this is undoubtedly why Harvard is special: The access to a network of powerful, wealthy, and influential individuals it provides is unparalleled. But for others, it’s why this institution can feel suffocating: We observe necessary conversations on equity and diversity dominated by highly privileged individuals posing as authoritative figures on social justice.

Should we simply shrug our shoulders and cede to privilege and power? No. I firmly believe that the constant pursuit of equity and inclusion is so vital that it merits and necessitates rigorous discussion.

Rather, we need to address the overt contradictions in our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s time to acknowledge that it is an immense privilege to philosophize on class and inequality in the comfort of a seminar or attend spiffy forums on political inclusion at the Institute of Politics, while simultaneously living a life with resources that the vast majority of people can only imagine. We should grapple directly with the contradictions that permeate Harvard, like the elite social clubs, long reserved for the most connected and well-endowed, that simultaneously seem to have made diversity and inclusion a priority. These contradictions should raise questions, concerns, and, most importantly, the standards we set for ourselves when we discuss — and practice — social justice.

I will never fully understand why an institution like Harvard, so exclusive and inaccessible, continues to dominate global discussions surrounding equity and justice. But I do know that some pills are tough to swallow: in this case, that the oppressive structures we read about, write about, and criticize in our classrooms are the same ones that brought many of us to this campus.

Over the course of three days, the EDIB forum grappled with pressing issues ranging from environmental racism to this institution’s legacy of slavery. We would all do well to participate in these kinds of conversations. What does it mean for us to unpack the intersections of class and global warming at an institution whose fossil fuel investments make up over a billion dollars of its endowment? How do we grapple with our institution’s deep ties to slavery as residents of undergraduate houses, like Mather and Winthrop, that memorialize our slave owning affiliates?

These questions, I hope, can drive us beyond ostentatious and limited discussions of social justice that dismiss ourselves from any accountability and instead move us towards recognition of our status as some of the greatest beneficiaries of the structures we often vehemently condemn.

Perhaps this article falls victim to its own critique: Only a privileged Harvard student would nitpick diversity initiatives from within his Cantabrigian sanctuary, as if anything he says could have a tangible impact beyond the walls of the ivory tower, and Crimson Editorial editors like myself have long positioned their overintellectual complaints as real movers of change in op-eds like these.

But I have faith that there is meaning in questioning our assumptions, approaching our daily conversations with greater intention, and reckoning with the fact that in our very own pursuit of equity, we benefit from the most inequitable positions of privilege.

Rhys Moon ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.