Is Harvard Doing Discourse Wrong?
If you've been a student at Harvard at any point over the past 3 years, there's one thing you've probably heard over and over and over again, intellectual vitality. You'll see it in videos.
Speaker 2:Intellectual vitality can be a, you know, a a institutional value.
Speaker 1:From our deans. You think about intellectual vitality. From students.
Speaker 2:Intellectual vitality comes from what I hope to find at Harvard.
Speaker 1:It's everywhere. And overwhelmingly, you'll get the sense that Harvard's concerned about the state of its discourse on campus. At what moment did you get dissatisfied or feel like, wait, I was expecting something else?
Speaker 2:Pretty much immediately when I came to campus.
Speaker 1:So what is intellectual vitality? The Harvard website says that it's about the college's attempts to, quote, establish a culture in which all members speak, listen, and ask questions of each other and ourselves with curiosity and respect. The implication here is the college isn't quite hitting the mark, that there isn't as much curiosity and respect as there should be, that it's something that spans across fields
Speaker 2:On politics, international relations, ethics, or religion.
Speaker 1:The Harvard's civil discourse isn't intellectually vital. And that's meant that the college has rolled out measure after measure to try to change that. One of the newest phases of that came this fall when intellectual vitality was included for the first first time in mandatory orientation training for freshmen entering the college and getting to know what Harvard is all about. But some people think that Harvard's approach to all of this is wrong, that it's attempts at intellectual vitality aren't helping, That it's missing the point and the real problem. One of them, Mateo
Speaker 2:Diaz, is a student who was asked by a Harvard
Speaker 1:administrator to record a video for that orientation training. He didn't see what came of it until this fall, when he and one of his peers, Saul Ardo, saw that intellectual vitality training before it was shown to freshmen. Matteo and Saul are both on the Crimson Centre editorial board, and they're joining us now to talk about why they think Harvard is falling short. This week on News Talk, is Harvard doing discourse wrong? From 14 Plympton Street, I'm Frank Joe.
Speaker 1:This is News Talk.
Speaker 3:My name is Sol Arno. I'm a junior, and I'm an executive on the editorial board.
Speaker 4:My name is Matteo Diaz. I'm a sophomore, and I'm an executive on the editorial board.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Matteo and Sol, for joining us. So y'all put out an op ed that's been making its rounds among students and among faculty circles circles on how Harvard facilitates civil discourse on campus or fails to do so. I'm wondering just to start if you could tell us your reactions to perspectives, the freshman orientation module, all 3 hours of it. Which parts do you find constructive and which parts were, like, this really misses the mark?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, Matteo and I were both pre orientation leaders for the 1st year urban program. And so we were given access to the orientation training modules to get a sense
Speaker 1:of what the students had
Speaker 3:as their exposure to what Harvard is like. And I'll zoom out for a second and just say, when when you're at Harvard in these last 3 years, you can't go without hearing the phrase intellectual vitality. And so seeing that civil discourse had been very explicitly integrated, I was really interested to see what it was gonna be like.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On paper, it's a big step.
Speaker 3:Right? On paper, you know, it's a huge step. This seems like it could be promising. And then I opened it, and it felt like, oh, gosh. What are we doing here?
Speaker 3:I so I guess some of it's useful. Right? We hear cognitive science about the kind of cognitive biases that we have and ways that we can avoid them, ways of engaging with people in difficult conversations through storytelling. But interspersed between that are a lot of other things. We're told to practice having friendships with people whose views are different by modeling ourselves after Justices Ginsburg and Scalia, which didn't really feel like a a a clear model for me as a college student, and it's hard for me to imagine the other college students seeing them a model for how we should be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why so?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, for one thing, Ginsburg and Scalia were really close friends while they were on a court that got it voting rights, that, allowed Super PACS to run wild, that allowed for a huge upsurge in gun violence. That there are all these ways in which it feels like it falls flat. But also, we just hear kind of examples that feel quite simple. We're we're told about 2 roommates who are having a dispute over the last orange in their fridge, and they're getting very upset. And then one of them realizes, oh, you know, I actually just need the zest from the orange.
Speaker 3:And everything's solved, and it kind of illustrates the value of both and thinking. Or we're told about, not in terms of, for instance, inclusion or free speech, but just in terms of inclusion and free speech. If these kind of issues are as simple as turning an or to an and, we wouldn't really have an issue to deal with in the first place. And so it feels like either, like, they're maybe doing some kind of conservative work or that they're talking down to us. And I think that as a result, it was hard to get a lot out of the modules, especially when, you know, I wanna hold the school to a high standard.
Speaker 3:I think we can do so much better than this. Is why critical.
Speaker 1:So if we zoom out a little bit and look say, okay, on paper, Harvard seemed to have asked its students to contribute to an orientation module, student leaders who have a lot of experience trying to facilitate conversations among different perspectives. Okay. So that's a check. 2, they find, quote, unquote, outside experts to build out a module that does this work. Right?
Speaker 1:You can see somebody outside of Harvard who hasn't seen perspectives who can say, hey. It seems like they made a good faith effort here to do a good job. What do you guys say to that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I I wouldn't disagree. But I think after a year of doxing, restrictions on student protest, a lot of issues that are very much tied to speech and and who gets to speak, to come in with a module that misses the mark isn't good enough, and it's it's not enough to say, hey. We tried. In the last year, speech has been all that anyone can talk about on campus, and Harvard can do better.
Speaker 4:We have the resources, certainly. And, you know, getting back to the content of the module, the only example that we see of activism or organizing is this GMO protester who's disruptive and at times even violent. But then he learns the error of his ways because he just looked into the facts after all these years. And seeing real time the restrictions on protest, to then go to the module and read that and think, is this what Harvard thinks about protest, that people who protest are just kind of misguided and ridiculous? And if they just looked into the facts, they would know better.
Speaker 4:It's like, wow. That is that really how we feel about this? This is really the message that we wanna send? And I think it's really concerning.
Speaker 3:It well, and the other thing I I might add too, which is that it was made by an organization called the Constructive Dialogue Institute. And as best I can understand, Harvard purchased it from them kind of close to ready made. And we were doing some research about the organization. And one of the people who cofounded it was this guy named Jonathan Haidt, who, you know, has gained a lot of prominence for being very critical of what he understands as coddling on American university campuses, and also quite critical of campus DEI programs. And the very first example is the story of a college president who whose anti immigrant views kind of came to light, and he was basically canceled.
Speaker 3:You know, it was a cancel culture story. And it felt like, oh, gosh, what are we doing here? My experience with the speech issues on campus has never been that there's a big issue with cancel culture on campus. It felt sort of reductive and simplistic. And you see a lot of his research shine through in this training.
Speaker 3:We're taught about, for instance, moral taste buds theory, which he's one of the main promoters of.
Speaker 1:Which is?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, a way of thinking about how our political views come to be. But it's taught as this is what psychologists understand about the development of our political understandings. And, you know, there's a link where we can click to learn more, and it takes us to the Amazon page for his book. And so there are ways in which we think that Harvard could do better because Harvard best understands the issues at Harvard, when it comes to speech culture. And so that's why we don't hold them to a a really high standard.
Speaker 4:And in my experiences at Harvard, I've had lots of conversations with people I disagree with and really had a chance to engage with others. I've spent the last semester on the editorial board, which has been an incredible space for having conversations, for speaking with peers whom I often disagree with, peers with views across the political spectrum.
Speaker 1:In fact, the model for what the web page says is really important to learn as a Harvard student. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. So so I felt that, you know, at at Harvard, I've been getting lots of intellectual vitality. And and even outside of the editorial board, in my conversations with my roommates in the dorm room late at night, and that that's really been present for me.
Speaker 1:But the fact that they choose to create an intellectual vitality initiative in the first place seems to signal on the heart of the administration that this is something that leaves more to be desired. Right? That in fact, maybe not every student's experience on campus is, quote, unquote, intellectually vital. So tell us then, when we say intellectual vitality initiative, like, the average student who hasn't followed it has no idea what's going into it, what have they done so far?
Speaker 3:Oh, boy. What haven't they done? Every 30 mil you get from the administrator mentions either intellectual vitality or civil discourse, And they're putting a lot of money and effort into this. They're hiring new people. They're establishing new fellowships for tutors to be involved in these initiatives.
Speaker 3:They're adding new stuff to the freshman orientation modules. They're putting on new speaker series. It sounds like they're doing a lot, and I don't wanna bash that. And it also feels like we hear all this talk about civil discourse right as last semester. The biggest opportunity for civil discourse on campus, they missed the mark.
Speaker 1:What was the opportunity there?
Speaker 3:That there was this massive amount of protest on campus, and the primary response to it was restrictions, that we're gonna restrict this speech, we're gonna punish this speech, but we're not really gonna engage with this speech. Provost Manning.
Speaker 1:That's the university's number 2 right behind the president.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He was asked about the many emails he had received from pro Palestine, students and faculty asking to initiate dialogue after he had said we really welcome dialogue. And his answer was, you know, President Garber isn't aware of those emails. And when you hear something like that, it it makes it really hard to believe that you're taking intellectual vitality when it's really hard, when it's really serious, when the stakes are as high as they can be. And so then, this semester, when we're hearing about new protest restrictions, you know, now you can't write in chalk in the yard.
Speaker 3:Now there are new plans to call in police in response to substantial disruption that it feels like there's the sort of broad orientation towards the real really challenging intellectual vitality concerns right now that sort of feels like it misses the mark. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So to play devil's advocate a little bit here, higher education administrators across the country all faced massive protests last semester and all of them took very different approaches. Some university leaders chose to, for example, negotiate with protesters and, come to what ended up being a sort of peaceful resolution there. But then donors and alumni spoke out sharply against the university stance and said, hey, you're not really standing up for the university's best interests when it comes to that. Still others decided to pull in the police and be somewhat draconian about it. And that too drew outrage from students and faculty.
Speaker 1:So, I mean, Harvard's response among many higher education leaders was kind of widely praised for all, as you guys were saying, its injurious effects on free speech. So tell us what you think Harvard should have done in a protest situation like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I think it's it's certainly a difficult situation. I don't wanna deny that. And there's lots of things that were good about Harvard's response. I'm glad that they didn't call on the police.
Speaker 4:And you we saw other campuses where there was outright violence. We didn't see that here, and that's a very positive thing. And I I think that the core issue is students have what are very valid concerns. There should be an outlet for students to express those concerns, and so then administration says, well, protest is not that outlet, and what you should do is go ahead and and use the other forums that we have and engage in the in the proper channels. But those proper channels, in effect, don't really exist.
Speaker 4:We see that students try to email administrators and then get met with, oh, we're not aware of those emails. Or, you know, students hold events, and then we saw a panel at Lowell House last semester on antisemitism and Islamophobia get canceled because there was a lot of backlash over the speakers' views about Israel and Palestine. And rather than try and support the resident tutor who was organizing it, the institutional sponsors, Lowell House and the Safra Center For Ethics, withdrew support. And so when folks have actually tried to have conversations and raise concerns through the proper channels, Like, we see support withdrawn. Emails are answered.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, what can we expect students to do? I think to the extent that we don't think that protest is is a proper channel or a valid means of discourse is is one conversation to have. But then also, if you're going to say that students can't protest and we're gonna put all these new restrictions in place and then not have actual other proper channels and or other forums for having conversation, you know, what are we doing? How can we do both those things at once?
Speaker 1:Well, so if we zoom out a little bit and look at, like, the cancel culture heavy framing on perspectives, the freshman orientation module. Somebody outside of Harvard might look at that and say, yeah, Harvard does have cancel culture. Like, liberal media is running amok, and Harvard is playing into that. Right? I'm curious, if not cancel culture, what has been your experience on campus in relation to civil discourse?
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's a great question. I think about this from the perspective a lot of being a trans person and talking about trans issues, which are the kind of thing that people are often hesitant to talk about because I've had several people before talk to me and say, you know, I'm just so scared of talking to trans people because I'm afraid that they're, like, mad if I say the wrong thing. I've never been talking to someone about identity and heard them say something that they didn't agree with and, like, yelled at them or gotten mad at them. Like, frankly, I found I've had the opposite effect where often someone will say something like, oh, I'm not quite sure I I agree there, but I'm not sure how to raise that point and very hesitant when it's an issue that I feel so strongly about.
Speaker 4:And so it's always interesting to me that people have this, you know, idea in their mind of, like, the angry liberal that's gonna yell at them and get mad because I have yet to ever yell at someone. And, obviously, I'm not representative of all people, but I would say that, like, most of my peers probably agree. I think that they are really interested in having conversations with other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Both of you have gestured at what you think is important to healthily facilitate civil discourse throughout this conversation. Tell us then if Harvard is doing discourse wrong, which is the top line of your op ed, what does it look like for Harvard to do discourse right? What is the blueprint there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sure. I'll give it a shot. First, I think there's some sort of baseline things. For instance, there were massive external threats to, free speech last semester with the docks and trucks that came to campus, the fact that many students had their names and information mailed to residents of Cambridge, for their participation in protest or sometimes for just being affiliated with an organization that was involved in protest.
Speaker 3:The university has to stake out a harder line. It was really disheartening that it took almost a year for them to release guidance just saying that to participate in the doxing of other students is to violate the code of conduct. There are baseline things like that. But I also think that more broadly, there are ways to facilitate discourse on campus that we mentioned in the op ed. For instance, Matteo brought up the example of a Lowell House tutor who organized a panel that was then canceled after all the institutional sponsors pulled their support.
Speaker 3:But when someone who's a resident tutor and early career scholar is responsible for organizing examples of civil discourse on campus, they need to have the support of the university. That when the people who are facilitating the conversations in our classes, the people who are running our seminars, who tend to often be either teaching fellows or untenured academic workers, they need to be certain that the university is gonna support them even if they don't always say the right thing, because that's the way we can have genuine civil discourse in the classroom.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'd I'd like to really emphasize that point. I think even in my experience and our experience as pre orientation leaders, we're looking for guidance from the folks, often not top level administrators or tenured faculty, but staff at the university or untenured academic workers. And they're often afraid, rightfully so, because they're worried about backlash. They're worried about losing their jobs if they say the wrong thing, in in no small part because of the way I think that we, as a university, have responded to controversial issues and to protests in the last year and to all of these things.
Speaker 4:And if a staff member or an unturned academic worker can't have a conversation with students because they're afraid of being fired and can't say the encampment and is referring instead to the elephant in the room or the events of last semester, What message does that send to students about what we're allowed to talk about? How are we supposed to move forward as a community if we can't talk about what's happened on our campus, let alone how we feel about it? Right? And so I think that's a huge issue.
Speaker 1:So what should Harvard be doing then to make sure that the campus is providing students the resources, the training to promote good civil discourse?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I think we have to offer a lot more concrete advice and examples to students. I think when we look at a training like Perspectives, we didn't really see any examples of a student of color or trans student or another marginalized student having a conversation on an issue of identity and how you might engage in that situation. So I think we need to offer concrete scenarios for students. If I'm a trans student and I'm having a conversation with a peer and gender affirming health care comes up, and they have an opinion that minors shouldn't have access to gender affirming health care, you know, and I disagree because as a minor, older minor, but at 17, you know, I had access to gender for my health care.
Speaker 4:And I want to engage with that person. Like, that's gonna be difficult because I have a very personal, you know, connection to that, and that makes my feelings a lot stronger. And I, you know, recognize that those are the situations that are tough for people. You know, if you're a student of color and someone's just said something that you feel is racist, how do you how do you engage with that person?
Speaker 1:So, so far, we've got improve on the things that Harvard has not done well, which certainly makes sense and certainly feels like baseline. But say we wipe the site clean and Harvard is able to take good baseline actions. What comes next?
Speaker 4:I think that a huge thing is having really good models for how to have conversation, how to facilitate conversation. On the editorial board, we have very clear guidelines for how we're gonna facilitate conversation. You know, we're gonna talk one at a time. We're not gonna, like, respond directly to someone and jump back at them, and and good facilitators who keep conversation going and check things before things can get out of hand. Another reason that I think we're able to have great conversations is because we have relationships and trust outside of just sitting in that board and talking, you know.
Speaker 4:We hang out after meetings, you know, we see each other in other settings. You know, we're not all best friends, but we're we're friends and we're peers, and and we take time to kind of cultivate relationships with one another. And so I think thinking about as a university, how do we give students kind of concrete advice for engagement, for facilitation? How do we step in and help facilitate conversations in the spaces where they need to be happening? Whether that's training for our students who are serving as advisors to other students, training for our teaching fellows, or giving staff the support and the space to facilitate conversations.
Speaker 4:And so I think that is really key.
Speaker 1:So the fact that this module began with cancel culture narrative, the fact that a lot of our conversations on the conversations on the editorial board too, I mean, tend to split along certain lines of political belief. Some people may just look at Hartford and say, hey. The share of students on your campus that is liberal or left leaning far outshines the share of students on campus that is right leaning or conservative. So Harvard just needs more conservative students. What do you say to that?
Speaker 3:You know, maybe in the abstract that might be true. But I think about seriously, if if we were serious about this idea, how would we follow through on it? And it would have to be affirmative action for conservative students or affirmative action for conservative professors. And in a world where we can't have race based affirmative action, where we don't have socioeconomic affirmative action, it seems to me like a solution like that falls flat. And the other thing I think I'll say is that I think back to last semester where there were huge ideological divides on the campus.
Speaker 3:And what that shows is that there are real divisions in the way people think, that that Harvard is not just some liberal monolith, and that people wanna be able to have serious thoughtful conversations across that difference. I think this sort of simple model that you have 3 conservatives and 3 liberals in a room, and then they have it out and they get to the bottom of it or whatever, and that's civil discourse. I think it's a little bit of a caricature. And I think that there are a lot of ways that we can have discussions across difference with people who share some values, share don't share others. And that Harvard already is a school that draws people from all over the country, all over the world, is able to set people up for that if we're given those tools.
Speaker 4:I'll add to that point too. I think, are we gonna, like, put a question on the Common App that asks everybody, are you a Democrat or a Republican? What's to stop people from, you know, like, changing their affiliation for the sake of college applications? And I think that's a little bit of an extreme, but I I don't think that there's actually an easy, practical way. I don't know that asking everybody for their ideology when we admit them is a is a great practice.
Speaker 4:And I think when we think about civil discourse, the the importance of it, the importance of intellectual vitality is that people can come to Harvard and engage with difficult ideas, with ideas they disagree with, and kind of through that process become better people, better thinkers. I don't think that we need to take a lot of effort to change that because it's already present. And how when the when it actually matters, when the stakes are high, when the moment arises, do we have conversation? And I think rather than go get more conservative students, we have yet to see, I think, Harvard do a really good job of facilitating discussion when the moment matters. And so if we can't do it in the last year over, you know, Israel Palestine, how are we gonna do it if we bring a bunch of conservative students to campus?
Speaker 1:So I'm gonna keep on playing this devil's advocate role and say, okay. As an institution, Harvard is making attempts to, nominally at least, to support civil discourse. So far, it seems like it hasn't really worked. And it's made a lot of students upset. Right?
Speaker 1:You guys mentioned the crackdown on protests. You can imagine student protesters and other left leaning students on campus saying, hey, Harvard is using civil discourse as like a Trojan horse of sorts to crack down on student movements. And that is quite the accusation to levy against a university that is, as at least what it's saying, trying to protect student safety, trying to make sure that these protests don't get violent. So in the event that another high stakes situation like this happens in the coming semester, what should Harvard do? What are the things that we should be looking to in the future?
Speaker 4:This is maybe not directly answering the question, but to speak to the concern about, Harvard's trying to use intellectual fatality just to crack down on protest and that it's kind of a disingenuous. I I don't think that that's totally true. I I have also heard folks say, this is kinda for the PR. That's a big criticism. I think it is genuine.
Speaker 4:The the administrators who I have talked to who are involved in this, I I think do really care about discourse and and really care about the values of intellectual brutality. I I don't think it's just a PR move, but I think that even if that's true, the kind of effect of doing that while restricting protest makes it so that students don't really trust administration and don't really trust intellectuality, and aren't bought in. And so I think that even thinking about, like, how do you make an initiative effective when you have a module like perspectives that comes across as kind of conservative and paternalistic. If you want students to buy into the thing that you're doing, you have to think about how your actions come across. And, you know, I've heard administrators say that it's unfortunate that this is happening in the last year with everything that's been going on, because it kind of comes across as a response or or an attempt to restrict protests.
Speaker 4:And so I think I'd like to see the chalking restrictions reversed. I'd like to see an improved signage restrictions reversed. And more broadly, conversations about protest and the role that it plays is really key.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the editorial board as a potential model for facilitating good civil discourse. And, yes, tons of good best practices there that have produced really incisive work from the editorial board. And I can imagine my blockmates, my friends who maybe aren't self selecting to enter a space like the Crimson editorial board, who couldn't care less if they talk every day to somebody who disagrees with them or who don't prioritize having conversations with people along ideological or demographic lines of difference. What do you say to that contingency in Harvard? How do you get them to become invested in civil discourse?
Speaker 3:I think civil discourse really is something all of us can benefit from. That whether it's in the classroom, talking to people you disagree with, whether it's living with roommates who you might have internal scaffolds with. You know, whether you're interested in organizing a campaign, even organizing a union, you know, talking to people who aren't already on the same page as you, which is what we're talking about at base when we're talking about intellectual vitality. That's a universal skill. And so the university should be thinking seriously about how to make that clear in the way it does the programming.
Speaker 4:I think at the point that Saul has already brought up, you know, it's a useful skill, period, even in smaller situations, like talking to a roommate or, like, later in the workplace. But I think to also get across to students that students have to wanna engage with one another. And if students don't want to, we're not going to accomplish anything by forcing them to. We'll put students in in those situations where they're experiencing disagreement. It it does really have to come from students.
Speaker 4:And so I think we have to think about how we cultivate interest and get students on board. It it has to come from them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. As best I understand it, teaching people how to disagree with each other productively is something that's in the mandate of the university, the same way I have to complete the requirements by concentration. I think I should also have to leave Harvard with a better understanding of how to talk to people who aren't on the same page as me. And I think that that could be reflected in the programming. They're already doing valuable things incorporating civil discourse into the expository writing requirement and to the general education program.
Speaker 3:We can even expand the freshman seminar program and focus them particularly on current events issues. The civil discourse takes practice, and it's okay for the university to push us towards the spaces where we can practice it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Matteo and Sol, for joining us to talk through all things Harvard's discourse and how we can make it better.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 1:News Talk is co hosted by Frank s Joe and Yael s Goldstein. This episode is produced by Frank s Jo. Our multimedia chairs are Addison y Leo and Julian j Giordano. Our managing editor is Miles j Herzenhorn. Our president is Jay Sellers Hill.
Speaker 1:From 14 Plympton Street, this is News Talk.
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