Crimson opinion writer
Eleanor V. Wikstrom
Latest Content
Why I Won’t Celebrate Harvard for Offering Tagalog
While I am undeniably elated by the news of Tagalog’s offering, I refuse to celebrate Harvard for a legacy it has yet to remake. Instead, I celebrate those who made this current moment possible — those who have been gradually drowning out Harvard’s systematic white noise by speaking alternate tongues of resistance all along.
Dissent: At Kempner, Zuckerberg Buys Harvard and Destroys Humanity
We have reason to be skeptical of Zuckerberg as a good steward of ethical AI research, and of the funding system that empowers him to pose as one under the legitimizing Harvard brand.
Scars of Empire: Harvard’s Role in U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines
Harvard’s legacy of empire and education is one haunted by loss; the instrument used to create this wound lies directly in the University’s hands. But without Harvard, I wouldn't be able to begin putting some of these pieces together.
Dissent: Harvard Should Never Close Its Gates
Our campus is at its most inclusive, most alive, and most beautiful when Harvard Yard and Harvard Square seem to bleed into one. After Oct. 11, unlike the rest of The Crimson’s Editorial Board, we look forward to seeing the gate restrictions disappear: Harvard University should never close its gates.
Colonialism, Course Offerings, and Continued Silence on the Philippines
The question of course offerings on Tagalog and the Philippines — or, more accurately, the lack thereof — is not whether Harvard has a duty to help its minority “ethnic” students learn about their own culture. It’s about what institutional silences signal about our reckoning with national history and complicity in the narratives that maintain oppression, a conversation that implicates us all.
The Future Is Mixed
What we need is to find a way to see the tension of difference not as a threat to be eliminated or avoided, but as a tool for revision and a source of creation. To do so, we must turn to those who have spent their entire lives learning to navigate and grow in the often-shunned space beyond rigid dichotomy. We must turn to the mixed community.
The Covid Redshift
We are attempting to take flight in a time that is defined by staying in place. We are attempting to enter the world while it practices isolation. In a year of crisis and profound societal loss, we need the milestones promised to us in childhood more than ever before — but it is a consequence of the very same crisis that we can never experience them entirely, that we may only ever watch as they recede beyond our reach.
This Semester, I Want To Get Good At Being Bad
It’s endemic to a society where young girls, especially girls of color, are taught that they should aspire to be likeable above all else, which includes not “causing problems” even in the face of direct threats to our well-being.
Watching the World Burn From My Harvard Dorm Room
When I left Oakland, the air quality was stifling; in Cambridge, there is no smoke that clouds my vision, no firestorm that keeps me constrained in visceral fear.