Dissent: Intellectual Vitality for Me, but Not for Thee

Two Harvard students walk into a bar and debate the most contentious topics today: the 2024 presidential election, immigration, abortion, and the conflict in Gaza.

Armed with modules from Jonathan Haidt, their top picks from the marketplace of ideas, and a deluge of messaging from the administration, they emerge smiling, pleased to have arrived at a consensus on every issue posed to them. In other words, they had finally attained true intellectual vitality.

It helped that they didn’t really disagree in the first place.

In a school where, according to surveys from The Crimson, less than ten percent of students and just under three percent of faculty identify as conservative or very conservative, it is no wonder that our peers dismiss the intellectual vitality initiative as a right-wing stealth op — a way for those unwelcome “deplorables” to elbow their way into our sacred safe spaces.

We fear that our out-of-touch peers have come to expect an intellectual environment in which the most radical dissent takes the form of tepid — as opposed to absolute — support for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

The Editorial Board fails to take issue with this lack of intellectual diversity, and as such, we must dissent.

The more that students dismiss intellectual vitality as a frivolous and unwelcome conservative intrusion, the more they prove that someone must remind them that half of Americans do not, in fact, believe that abortion is a human right, that God is dead, or a hundred other things that are settled debates only within the ivory towers of the university.

Calling Harvard a progressive echo chamber is so oft-repeated that we fear sounding trite. But the fact that even the latest intellectual vitality push has failed to convince our peers of the problem is highly disappointing.

Conservative self-censorship is off the charts; anyone interested in the free exchange of ideas should be alarmed by the need to qualify oneself to preempt any suspicions of conservatism when articulating even the most trivial amount of sympathy for a right-wing position.

We wonder, then, what kinds of discussions our peers would be willing to countenance under the aegis of intellectual vitality.

Until students can express views in class that genuinely run counter to campus’s prevailing orthodoxy without fear of social ostracism, we reluctantly agree with some of the critiques that our peers have made of Harvard’s intellectual vitality initiative thus far: that it’s simplistic and far too corporatized.

If Harvard is actually serious about intellectual vitality, it must solve the root of the problem first: the school’s political makeup.

Until then, we worry that the intellectual vitality initiative is nothing more than a pretty bandage on a festering wound.

Jack P. Flanigan, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a sophomore in Pforzheimer House. Isaac R. Mansell ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Statistics concentrator in Kirkland House. Yona T. Sperling-Milner, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a sophomore in Cabot House. Henry P. Moss IV ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History concentrator in Eliot House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.