It should come as no surprise that a conference about disagreement began with a disagreement. President Alan M. Garber opened the thirteenth annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching conference with a filmed message. “As we have sought to improve learning throughout the university,” he said, “the focus has always been on innovation.”
But during Kemper professor of history Jill Lepore’s opening presentation (“a very brief history of academic freedom”), she challenged Garber. “When we look for ideas about how to teach well and how to tolerate disagreement, I don’t know that we need new gadgets. I think we actually need some very ancient ideas, and we need to bring new life into them,” she said. “We need to think more about the human in us and less about the distraction of technology.”
This year’s conference, “Open Minds in Dialogue,” focused on free inquiry and fostering open, rigorous academic conversations—a major focus of attention in the wake of last year’s fierce disagreements over the war in the Middle East (see reports on fall term opening days messages from Garber, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, and others). Leaders of various Harvard schools spoke about the challenges to free expression on their respective campuses. Harvard Business School’s Matthew Weinzierl (senior associate dean and chair of the M.B.A. program) and Harvard Medical School’s Bernard Chang (dean for medical education) said that their schools have a specific charge—preparing students for professions—and so can tailor classroom goals around that. But the College, said Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, has a broader mandate: “We are producing citizens for a pluralistic democracy” (a theme she broached at the first-year convocation September 2). That can be a more complex task than preparing a young doctor to practice alongside diverse peers.
Speakers emphasized that some of the contentious discussions are more than just heated political debates. Whereas students generally engage respectfully with opposing ideas on certain issues (like gun control), other issues feel more fundamental (like gender identity). Students, said Claybaugh, are saying “identity” in the way people used to say “religion”—“absolutely foundational, existential.”
Students reported a chilling environment for speech focused on contentious issues, both political and personal. An afternoon panel featured the co-chairs of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group organized last April by Garber and Provost John F. Manning: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ senior adviser on civil discourse Eric Beerbohm, professor of government, and Radcliffe dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin. The pair cited survey data from their forthcoming report. (Though there is no formal timeline for its release, Beerbohm told Harvard Magazine it would be published “in a matter of weeks” and that a draft was submitted before its September 1 deadline.) Beerbohm reported that the students who most felt restricted in their speech were political moderates.
In conversations with more than 600 Harvard community members, the task force found that a wide range of people reported speech-related pressures and constraints. Beerbohm said that students believe they must be perfect in class, rather than viewing discussions as testing grounds. Brown-Nagin reported that non-tenured faculty especially feared repercussions in their teaching evaluations if they pushed students too much in dialogue. Such mismatched incentives will be addressed in the forthcoming report. “Most people want to be less fearful to contribute, but we have to coordinate it,” said Beerbohm. “How do we think about a series of levers that will encourage that shift?”
The coming weeks may serve as an early test of Harvard’s recent emphasis on educating students and others about constructive dialogue. The one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel is already causing ripples on college campuses (such as the University of Maryland, which is restricting student-run events on that day). As Harvard administrators and faculty members continue to ponder dialogue across differences, the major question remains: will students embrace those efforts?
