Last year, in the midst of all of the turmoil on campus in the aftermath of October 7, I sat down to dinner with a Muslim friend. With so many of our peers facing threats of doxxing, she told me how stressful it was to even walk to class from her dorm along the river. She turned to me with a look of utter confusion and said, “I just don’t understand why this is happening.”
Growing up in the Jewish community, I understood where the fear and pain were coming from, just as I abhorred the reckless endangerment of my peers by people from outside the University. We had a long, teary discussion about traumas, both historical and present. We didn’t meet under the auspices of formalized “dialogue,” and we didn’t solve anything—far from it. But we hugged and agreed to continue to have meals together.
It seems “dialogue” is everywhere on campus these days. In response to the past year and a half of protests, backlash, and counter-backlash, the University has run damage control, creating new initiatives to fix the supposed crisis on campus. For undergraduates, one of the most visible and least understood has been the Harvard College “Intellectual Vitality” initiative. According to its glossy website, the program aims to build “a culture that celebrates honest inquiry and respectful disagreement.” The ethos of Intellectual Vitality, according to program fellow Ari Kohn ’26, is that “truth comes from an amalgamation of different experiences.”
While it was founded by students in 2021, before the explosion of controversy around the Middle East war, Intellectual Vitality has quickly become the face of the University’s efforts to “foster dialogue.” Its efforts—often student-run—might be well-meaning. But they also garner mockery. I’ve seen Intellectual Vitality used as a punchline at comedy shows on campus, standing in for all administrative efforts that seem clumsy and opaque. The jokes tend to focus on the name: nobody really knows what “intellectual vitality” means. The term implies the baffling idea that intellectualism is on life support; the capital-I Intellectuals are keeling over at their study carrels. For a program perceived as a balm to campus tensions, it seems to outwardly address a problem that doesn’t exist.
But even if you take it at face value, an imposed-from-above push for “intellectual vitality” runs into a significant roadblock: students and faculty haven’t agreed on which speech is vital, and which is verboten. We are trying to be open to free dialogue but often cannot agree on the terms of discussion, or on whether there are certain topics that cannot, should not, or need not be discussed. The debate over the war in the Middle East has tested our definition of free expression. Are there questions too incendiary to pose? Are there slogans too incendiary to chant? And what does it mean to have open and honest debate in this context?
The very status of free debate has never been this unstable. In my first year at Harvard, there was a sizable pro-life celebration in Tercentenary Theatre after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade. I saw my fellow classmates cheering and smiling in public, unhindered, for a viewpoint that I personally disagree with. Last year at Alumni Day, President Alan M. Garber was glitter-bombed by an animal rights protester. Neither of these events garnered significant, sustained public attention. After being attacked by gold glitter, Garber even affirmed the hope that free speech would continue to thrive on campus.
Yet in our current campus environment, certain protests cause far more outrage than others. In some cases, the vitriol extends to a desire to remove differing opinions entirely. Kohn told me that during a recent conversation about whether anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, some students came up to her and said there was “no point in hearing out the other side.” There’s a pervasive sense in some corners of campus, she said, “that trying to understand the other side is endorsing it.”
Still, among the students I have talked to, very few are unwilling to engage in open debate with other students individually. Even some of the most politically extreme students profess enthusiastic openness to engage the other side. Violet Barron ’26, an organizer with Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, said, “I make a point of talking to people who disagree with me, especially because I am intimately aware of the ruptures in the Jewish community that have really come to light in the last 18 months.” Barron, who is a fixture at pro-Palestine protests, said that individual dialogue helps keep her off “autopilot.”
Michael Oved ’25, an outspoken conservative on campus, said he has a good friend who is liberal, and they frequently have long discussions about politics. “We talk to each other for a very long time about why we disagree about what we disagree about,” he said. “That’s the beauty of disagreement. It helps me to better understand my opinion.” If the students themselves are willing to engage with each other, then the problem must be more external.
Indeed, there’s a prevailing administrative and outsider narrative that debate is completely stymied on campus. And yes, our campus is certainly divided. Most students spend the majority of their time talking to people who agree with them politically. But it’s not for lack of empathy for one another or lack of opportunities to converse. As Oved, Barron, and others I have talked to confirm, students themselves are largely open to difficult conversations. The deeper siloing of students into different camps is a symptom of national polarization, which is exacerbated by outside media attention that forces the narrative of political division and vitriolic protest.
We are constantly sharing physical space with those whom, in the real world, it would be far easier to avoid.
Because what actually happens at Harvard—and at most universities that draw students from across the world, each with a unique background—is that you find yourself in classes with people who are unlike you. You regularly interact with those you disagree with through the hundreds of minor ways that the infrastructure of the college environment makes inevitable. “I am in classes with staunch Zionists and people who have bullied me for my beliefs, and I don’t take it personally,” said Barron. That’s the beauty of the housing system: we all return to the same few dorms at the end of the day. We are constantly sharing physical space with those whom, in the real world, it would be far easier to avoid.
In short, there’s a limit to how divided we can be, and a failure to understand this is what makes it easy for outsiders to misinterpret the situation on campus. Last year, Harvard was ranked dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) free speech rankings. These findings, based on anonymous survey data, don’t tell the full story and even exacerbate the problem. We students are left in a negative feedback loop: the more people outside Harvard proclaim that there’s a crisis of free speech on our campus, the more the University responds with administration-heavy initiatives. And the more institutional initiatives proliferate, the more public scrutiny is turned on student debate, which in turn makes students less likely to speak their minds outwardly and more likely to isolate themselves amongst those they agree with.
Nina Howe-Goldstein ’25, who pens a biweekly cultural criticism blog called “The Real Haters of Cambridge, Mass.,” has written that Intellectual Vitality is just another administrative solution to a problem rooted in the anxieties of Harvard donors and stakeholders. “There is an imagined heterodox thinker in the back of every Gender Studies GenEd, afraid to speak his mind for fear of being shouted down by the Woke Mob,” she wrote this spring. “The university cowers, promising to protect our heterodox thinker’s Good Speech while cracking down on his classmate’s Bad Speech, refusing to acknowledge the inherent tension.”
Howe-Goldstein recently attended an Intellectual Vitality event where students were asked to bring an opinion they disagreed with and then imagine how someone would come to hold that opinion. While this empathetic exercise is clearly worthwhile, the top-down structure of the event led to “misery and drudgery,” she told me.
Another complaint, for many, is that the administration seems to swoop in and dictate the terms of discussion, without acknowledging some of the fundamental disagreements on the terms of debate. A friend of mine summed up this existential frustration: “It feels like we’re saying two plus two equals four, and the other side is saying two plus two equals six. Then the University says, ‘Let’s compromise and say two plus two equals five.’”
In my experience, what really gets people to engage in debates with high emotional stakes is letting students find ways to talk to each other. It might be that indirect measures—like reducing House dining restrictions or offering more funding to clubs that host events open to all students—could foster more respectful dialogue on campus.
It’s also naive to say that all animosity can be solved with discussions, but what the proliferation of antisemitism and Islamophobia on Sidechat—an anonymous college messaging platform—should show us is that the more anonymous and removed we are from each other, the less likely we are to talk and relate to each other productively.
I have tried this myself, committing my time to creating spaces for non-judgmental dialogue. I cofounded a new Jewish student group that has hosted fruitful and difficult discussions among people who genuinely respect each other and genuinely disagree. We’ve been able to do that because of personal connections built over time. This is not thrilling stuff. It takes slow weeks of poor attendance—two people forlornly sitting in a room—to prepare for moments when current events drive people toward a space to discuss their thoughts.
This is part of the unspoken problem of fostering dialogue—it takes time, patience, and foresight. With students cycling through every four years and political events growing increasingly outlandish and unpredictable, we need to be building long-term relationships and structures that can absorb and respond to tensions when they erupt on campus.
It’s not perfect. I know there are people who would feel uncomfortable in a discussion together, and I know that what starts out as productive disagreement can sometimes devolve into something unhelpful to everyone involved. But there’s still value in trying. And it seems more likely to me that these productive disagreements are taking place outside of the obsessively organized College events, in all of the minute ways people interact on campus.
Community organizers follow this model all the time. Harvard’s disagreement problem seems to come from envisioning the University as an institution first and a community second. We have to flip that script around.
In April, I helped host a Passover Seder. It was similar to seders I’ve hosted in the past, except this one was supported by funding from Intellectual Vitality. What worked about this seder, in contrast to other Intellectual Vitality efforts, was its true community-forward focus. The space was created by and for students who were first and foremost friends and peers. We asked participants a provocative question: “Why have so many of us come to believe that to be free, we must destroy others’ freedom?” I noticed that a hush fell over the room, and the question hung heavy in the air. But we were all okay. We drank wine and toasted the person next to us.
Crucially, we stayed even amid the discomfort, enjoying each other’s company as human beings.
