The Hubris of Harvard Students

I’m often dismayed by the behavior of my fellow students.

And no, I’m not talking about antisemitism (for once!) or hate speech of any kind. No, Harvard students are just plain entitled. We take classes from some of the most respected researchers and professors in the world — but we give them no respect. We are at the country’s top university, and yet, many of us fail to show any appreciation for the immense privilege we have been granted.

The main problem is that Harvard students lack epistemic humility. We are somehow unable to recognize the limits of our own knowledge, and approach learning with curiosity and respect.

Our entitlement manifests in several ways.

Anyone who has attended a Harvard lecture has surely seen students hunched over their laptops solving the New York Times crossword or scrolling through their friends’ Instagram stories. I can count on one hand the number of my friends who haven’t, at some point, proudly told me about skipping class. I’ve also seen students with only a surface-level understanding of a particular subject openly and defiantly argue with world-class professors who have spent their entire lives studying and researching the material.

However, these actions are trivial tokens of disrespect compared to other actions students feel comfortable taking.

Harvard students’ entitlement doesn’t just affect classroom conduct — it has serious implications for free speech on campus as well.

For instance, in 2021 the volunteer director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force in the Human Evolutionary Biology Department — who was a mere graduate student — publicly condemned remarks from a lecturer at Harvard Medical School in which she defended using the terms “male” and “female” when discussing biological sex.

As a result of the incident and resulting backlash, the lecturer said she felt forced to leave Harvard after 20 years because of what she called a “culture of intolerance.” She has since written that “educators are increasingly self-censoring, for fear that using the ‘wrong’ language can result in being shunned or even fired.”

It’s as if we, as students, have become so convinced of our own moral and intellectual superiority that we believe we have already learned all there is to know about the world.

Too often, we let our sense of self-aggrandizement impede our own education. And if, god forbid, a professor — at least equally brilliant and a whole lot more knowledgeable than ourselves — subscribes to an opinion different from our own, we badger and dismiss them. At best, students simply avoid the classes taught by professors with whom they disagree. At worst, they try to get them fired.

That is not to say that there is nothing that professors can learn from their students or that we can’t learn from our peers. Each student here was admitted, in part, because of their intellect and the unique life experiences they contribute to our community. However, the experience and knowledge of the Harvard faculty are invaluable. As long as professors act in good faith and within the realm of factual evidence, students should give them the benefit of the doubt.

Entitlement manifests in student protests too. Last spring, in defiance of University rules, a group of Harvard students set up an encampment in Harvard Yard, occupied University Hall, and stormed into classrooms obstructing the regular course of classes, demanding the University to divest from Israel.

They later had the audacity to complain about the University’s failure to respond to their demands. They were outraged when Harvard didn’t protect them from punishment, even when they broke the University’s rules themselves.

Harvard’s website says that “before students can help change the world, they need to understand it.” In reality, we do the exact opposite. We try to change the world before we understand anything about it. We believe, with a false sense of self-importance, that we simply know better.

This sense of entitlement is ultimately corrosive to the University’s mission. Harvard is meant to be a place where ideas are rigorously tested, where respectful debate is embraced, and where students come not to be coddled but to be challenged. Yet, increasingly, students seem to expect Harvard to conform to their own beliefs rather than expecting to engage with a diversity of perspectives. We should approach our education with a sense of humility rather than assuming we are already in possession of the truth.

Maya Shiloni ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Mather House