Harvard Students Are Afraid to Speak Freely
And why the university should admit *more* rich kids
On today’s Harvard-themed post, we’ll examine what it means to be offended, why apologies have become so fraught, and why the world’s most elitist university should admit even more rich kids.
But first …
From former president Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony to the FIRE ranking that placed the university dead last on speech, Harvard sure has been taking a thumping on free expression.
The university has made some effort to turn things around.
It launched a variety of new efforts to improve the state of speech on campus including the Intellectual Vitality Initiative and the Civil Discourse Initiative. A group of professors founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, and students then formed their own group, Harvard Undergraduates for Academic Freedom. (Turns out our special event screening of The Coddling Movie was the very first event hosted by HUAF.)
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And yet, Harvard’s own students still regard the university as a stifling place.
Only one third of graduating seniors at Harvard feel free to express their opinions on controversial subjects. That’s according to the results of a 2024 Senior Survey, and amounts to a 13 percent drop from 2023.
The findings were released in a recent report issued by the Classroom Social Compact Committee, which found that despite “near-universal support for the principle of free speech,” there is disagreement about how Harvard “can support open expression in practice.”
The report adds, “Whatever the causes of explicit and implicit censorship on campus, it is clear that Harvard hasn’t found a way to address them robustly.”
The speech problem is widespread, but it affects some students more than others: