Where Does Harvard’s Orientation for Activists Fit In Now?

The First-Year Urban Program’s preorientation tour hit all the landmarks typical of tried-and-true campus tours, winding from Lamont Library and University Hall to the Science Center and Memorial Church.

But as undergraduate leaders shepherded wayward freshmen on this cinched, circuitous route through campus, they struck altogether different highlights from those you’d hear on a usual Harvard tour. Here was what used to be the women’s entrance to Lamont; there, the steps where pro-Palestine protesters sat before draping a keffiyeh around the John Harvard statue in 2024; there, the Science Center walkways where dining workers picketed during their historic strike in 2016.

This tour, dubbed the “DeTour,” has long been a staple of FUP, Harvard’s pre-orientation program for freshmen interested in civic engagement. Shaped and reshaped over the years, the DeTour’s script — 35 pages in 2024 — was a living document meant to tug at historical sediment left untouched by usual Harvard excursions.

But this year, DeTour vanished. Instead, students in the program chose between different options. One tour could track a day in the life of a Computer Science student; another, a FUP leader’s favorite study spaces.

Faced with directives in May to alter the service- and activism-centered program in the wake of Harvard’s showdown with the Trump administration and the results of University-wide task force reports, FUP’s staff leaders quickly announced a suite of changes to the program. The fiery DeTour was on the chopping block — alongside other program mainstays, including panels with local advocates and a reading packet with articles on issues ranging from labor unions to police abolition.

“We have to work within some parameters,” Director of Student Engagement and Leadership Varsha Ghosh wrote in a June email announcing the changes to FUP leaders. She pointed them toward the program’s new mission statement, which omitted previous pledges to help grassroots organizations and catalyze involvement in activism — instead focusing on students’ individual civic journeys and social spaces.

The changes mark a tonal shift for FUP, which had traditionally been Harvard’s gateway to activism, a chance for eager freshmen to learn the intricacies of advocacy from upperclassmen who’d maneuvered through picket lines themselves. FUP flourished in an era when universities sought out activists, and a certain amount of earnest disruption was seen as part and parcel of the college experience.

Now, with the Trump administration cracking down on diversity initiatives and administrators showing less tolerance for campus activism, it is unclear whether the program — as decades of students knew it — has a place in Harvard College’s future.

“After discussions with the co-chairs, committee heads, and other leaders, we hope that this new design and subsequent changes preserve the spirit of FUP that I have witnessed over the past decade,” Ghosh wrote in the email.

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When Kathleen T. “Kathy” Fitzgerald ’86 set about creating FUP in 1984, she didn’t envision it as something explicitly political. But she was nevertheless acutely aware of the ’80s zeitgeist: Under the reign of Reaganism, social programs were being slashed while her friends built a shantytown in Harvard Yard to protest apartheid in South Africa.

In these early years, FUP got some support from the University — students stayed in graduate dorms over the summer — but everything was almost entirely student-run. Over time, though, Assistant Dean of Civic Engagement and Service Travis Lovett says that the program has received more backing from the College and the Dean of Students Office. Alongside stronger funding, Lovett says that staff involvement in FUP has also increased as student leaders became busier over the summers.

For years, Harvard’s heightened institutional engagement coexisted with its activist ethos. Participants would attend panels where local advocates — ranging from formerly unhoused people to members of campus labor unions — would discuss justice and organizing in the specific context of Cambridge and Boston. Then, they’d pursue public-service projects on worksites, some of which could be closely tied to the issues the panelists broached.

Participants would also receive a packet of readings on political and social issues. Packets from 2022 and 2023, reviewed by The Crimson, ran over 100 pages and leaned heavily on op-eds and essays on political and social issues ranging from affirmative action to ableism. 2024’s reading packet saw a more tailored syllabus, drawing more closely on panel-specific issues.

Cracks to the program began to show that year, when the war in Gaza sparked a wave of pro-Palestine protests — and left students and staff with the complicated task of interpreting the activism right in front of them. Lovett said staff were concerned by feedback from some students after 2024’s FUP session, where a few participants criticized how FUP leaders handled discussions about conflict in the Middle East when the issue came up.

Students have never been explicitly asked to moderate conversations about Middle East conflicts — or Israel and Palestine in particular — in discussion groups. But the spring 2024 encampment was a development the advocacy-focused program couldn’t ignore. Student leaders drafted new sections in the reading packet and DeTour on the encampment, but according to two 2024 FUP leaders, there were still disagreements over how best to field student questions on the issue.

These, however, weren’t contentious enough to reshape their approach to 2024’s FUP significantly. It was the next year that internal reviews — and external pressure from the Trump administration — would force major changes to the program.

Federal agencies did not specifically mention FUP in their April letter to Harvard demanding cuts to a suite of programs deemed DEI-heavy or biased. But given Harvard’s ongoing battle with the White House and the results of two University task force reports — which advised administrators to “deeply examine and revise pre-orientation programs” — staff took aim at sections of the program most likely to draw federal ire.

The reading packet was nixed entirely, and the panels included only Harvard affiliates. Workshops with Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz focused on students’ ability to craft narratives about their service journeys and build community. A session with History and Literature lecturer and Cambridge School Committee candidate Lilly Havstad on cultural awareness and positionality had students interview their peers and then reflect on how they felt before and after the interviews — focusing again on personal perspectives and experiences.

According to Lovett, FUP organizational staff decided on the new direction for the program and ran it past the Dean of Students Office before returning to FUP leaders and asking for their input.

“We tried to think about the political circumstances, regardless of who might be in power or who might be in office,” Lovett says.

In reconstructing FUP, Lovett says, staff wanted to ensure that “we’re not just supporting one viewpoint, we’re not just supporting one ideology, that we’re really helping students to find themselves” — something he said was not “consistently” accomplished by previous iterations of the program.

The contours of the changes were released to FUP leaders in June in online meetings and fleshed out more fully during training for FUP leaders in August. In the interim, the College closed its diversity offices and talks between Harvard and White House officials continued.

Former FUP leader and campus organizer Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26 had signed up to be a leader again in the spring, but opted out — a decision they say was strongly influenced by the changes to the program.

“For myself and for a lot of other people, those changes really deeply impacted how much we wanted to be involved and what FUP was at its core,” Pasquerella, a Crimson Magazine editor, says.

“What we saw this summer was kind of an encroachment on what FUP was meant to be, oversight that FUP should not have had by both administrators and staff members,” they add.

Brian C.W. Palmer ’86, one of FUP’s founders and an anti-apartheid organizer in his days at the College, says that the overhaul of change to FUP “goes against the values” that he and his co-founders hoped to bring to the program in its seminal years.

“It goes against the more benevolent spirit of earlier Harvard administrations that trusted student leadership to create something good, and didn’t feel that students need to be micromanaged, detail-managed, all the time,” he says.

Lovett wrote in a statement that “students had the ability and right to pursue a variety of other options if they weren’t comfortable with moving forward.” Many stuck with it, he wrote, speaking to “the shared belief that this program is incredibly important on campus and in the community.”

College spokesperson Alixandra A. Nozzolillo added in a statement that the Dean of Students Office “regularly evaluates all pre-orientation programs to ensure they align with the College's mission and goals, and that they effectively serve as transition programs for new students entering the College.”

Even within the altered structure of FUP, incoming students brush shoulders with organizers in activist groups like the Student Labor Action Movement and the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee. Former FUP leader Zavier S. Chavez ’23 says that as a participant in the program, he saw his own FUP leaders as “very rebellious” — and that informal exposure to activism informed his understanding of student organizations on campus.

“Having that encouragement to see all these students who were making their own clubs, doing their own social activism, and having been around that environment and having them show us that it’s possible to do as long as you’re passionate about it, I think was very valuable,” he says.

A. Ruby Arun ’29, a FUP participant, says the emphasis on collective action and organizing around political issues was still detectable this summer.

“You learn very quickly why activism is so core to a lot of these people in FUP,” she says.

—Magazine writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.