Columns
When Extracurriculars Become Full-Time Jobs
A common defence of grade inflation is that it protects student welfare. That might be true, but at Harvard, concerns over wellbeing should be directed elsewhere: pre-professional clubs that demand grueling hours from students.
Recentering Academics Demands a Revolution
As students seek an avenue to respond to the turmoil before them, Harvard’s curriculum must adapt – or risk becoming obsolete altogether.
By Ignoring Race, Alumni Interviews Erase Reality
This policy may satisfy Trump, but it betrays Harvard’s own principles. The College cannot claim to value diversity while systematically erasing the identities that make its community diverse in the first place.
In Defense of the New Housing Day
The importance of Housing Day isn’t the exact day of the week on which it falls, but the fact that it happens in the first place. Instead of lamenting the loss of a random Thursday before spring break, students should welcome the change.
I Didn’t Deserve To Be Admitted To Harvard
Can Harvard’s admissions office actually determine who deserves an acceptance letter? Probably not.
Who’s Going To Do Claybaugh’s Dirty Work?
Instituting grade deflation requires a whole lot of manpower that we don’t have.
The Cost of Classroom Kindness
Professors should also be encouraged to critique boldly, constructively, and honestly. Harvard attracts students not because we fear difficulty, but because we seek it. If this University believes in our potential, it must trust us enough to demand more than comfort. Let discomfort return to the classroom.
Changing Grades Won’t Fix the Humanities — Here’s What Will
The humanities are serious disciplines — it’s time for academic programming at Harvard to treat them as such.
What Grades Can’t Measure
A Harvard education isn’t defined by the hours spent in Lamont. It’s defined by how we learn to balance ambition with curiosity. Administrators can change the grading curve, but the real learning happens when students decide what matters to them.
Ethicist, Should I Let Go of My Zionist Friends?
At the end of the day, a friendship built across disagreement does not demand that you hide or abandon your beliefs. Sustaining conversations across ideological and moral divides might require that you strengthen your convictions.
The Fun You’re Missing Is in Lavietes
Harvard's women's basketball team is winning and making history — all while playing to half-empty bleachers.
Harvard, Stop the Handholding
When it comes to building a real family at Harvard, less parenting from the College is better.
Independence Isn’t Cheap, but Harvard Can Afford It
Talk is cheap, and in our case, inaction far too expensive. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is — that starts with the endowment.
Does Community Input Speak for Cambridge? According to the Data, No
That’s not to say Cambridge shouldn’t listen to its residents. But when public comment becomes a ritual stage for a tiny, unrepresentative minority, it’s worth asking whom that process really serves.
Institutional Neutrality Is Impossible. Harvard Must Accept That Fact.
For Harvard, institutional neutrality is a convenient cop-out. In the face of intense public, political, and financial scrutiny, urging the University to pick a side, it can remove itself from the equation entirely. Meanwhile, Harvard’s partisanship lurks in the decisions it inevitably has to make.
Ph.D. Cuts Are the Beginning of the End for Academia
Trump’s attacks have irrevocably altered the playing field for academia, and it may never recover.
The Tourists Know More Than You
By encouraging the student body to wrestle with the weight of Harvard’s legacy, the University can both educate and inspire students to wield its name wisely.
An Update on Gr*ding at Harvard
And lest I neglect to mention: These things are changing now. Three, two, one, go. What are you still reading this report for? Don’t you have a discussion post to do? Move it!
It’s My Right To Pull an All-Nighter, Canvas.
As we recover from our fifteen hours without Canvas, we should reflect on how sites like these affect our lives and those around us — for better and for worse. All I ask is this: Professors, please extend a little compassion to us students and give us back our evenings.
Want to Beat Trump? Include Students.
The battle against higher education is far from over. But due to the range of sacrifices students have had to make, Harvard owes its students a listening ear at the very least.
Diversity Requires Your Participation
I used to see this archetypal Harvard student as the ideal. But as an Orthodox Jew, my own self-identity often failed to adhere to this model — both in theory and practice.
The Media Must Stop Oversimplifying Harvard
When national media outlets cherry-pick evidence to lambast rampant antisemitism or lack of rigor at Harvard, this coverage helps lay the justificatory groundwork for such attacks. Harvard may be an easy target due to its perceived elitism, but the downstream consequences are dire.
The Bandaids on a Pedagogical Bullet Hole
Both attendance requirements and “flipped classrooms” are bandages on the festering problems of lecture-skipping and a lack of engagement.
Harvard Cannot Save Us From Ourselves
If a publication prints something offensive, the answer is speech, not sanction. If a chant crosses a moral line, the answer is argument, not discipline. Students should not call for an intifada nor should they quote Hitler. It’s our job to say so, not the Dean’s.