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Harvard means a lot of things to a lot of people.

To some, it represents a school outside of a city on a hill: a shining beacon representing the pinnacle of American excellence. To others, it’s more like build-a-brahmin: a gateway to the American elite. And let us not forget Harvard’s status as the Kremlin on the Charles — a hotbed of radical lunatics radicalizing lunatics to-be.

But Harvard’s beauty is not in the eye of its beholder. It’s a school. And as we navigate the seemingly endless controversies on campus, it would do us good to treat it as such — particularly as we struggle over who gets to attend it. Harvard, as an institution of higher education, exists for one reason: To promote academic excellence — that is, the pursuit of truth.

How Harvard engages in this mission of perfecting academic excellence therefore ought to be the central metric we use to evaluate campus controversies. If this sounds like common sense, it’s because it is — and yet, it remains durably controversial.

The manner in which Harvard ought to select its student body, for example, has been a matter of contentious dispute for at least the past century.

First came the expansion of the meritocratic franchise: The University warmed up to admitting Jews, African Americans, and women. More recently, admissions discourse shifted from focusing on equality in process to equality in outcomes exemplified in roiling debates over race or class-based affirmative action, or even admissions boosts for conservatives or men.

Most recently, Harvard ended its undergraduate minority recruitment program, likely in response to pressure from the Trump administration, who have employed a maximalist interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.

It’s easy for these debates to get lost in differing conceptions of our raison d’être.

For example, some arguments justify affirmative action to rectify historic discrimination against minorities in this country: We ought to give underprivileged minorities a leg up in college admissions because for so long we did the opposite. Another common view is that, especially among the Ivy League, affirmative action is necessary to produce a diverse American elite so that we can achieve diversity among politicians and Fortune 500 CEOs.

On the other hand, take the argument against gender integration in the most recent edition of the Salient. The piece argues that integration violates philosophical and theological conceptions of wellbeing, “melding together two fundamentally different natures and modes of flourishing.”

These modes of flourishing, “fraternitas—or, more properly for the women, sororitas,” are “impossible in a coeducational setting.” Because the university is “charged with the formation of the whole person—integrum hominem,” we must “respect and cultivate these distinct potentials.”

Although argumentation via italicized Latin is alluring, each of these perspectives mistake the fundamental reason Harvard exists. Admission to the University is a rather odd tool for reparations, and it’s neither a vehicle for social engineering nor a mechanism to promote narrow theological conceptions of the good life.

Harvard’s purpose is educational excellence. The case for affirmative action should thus center around this mission. In my view, diverse classrooms, labs, and departments are ones better equipped to discover the truth, because they draw from the full range of human talent. Reasonable people can debate this claim, without straying from an interpretation of the College’s goals as being fundamentally truth-seeking.

Similarly, the case for gender integration rather than a separate-but-equal system (beyond the fact that a segregated system has never achieved equality) is that women make Harvard better at its core mission. A Harvard in which men and women do not compare notes on H. pylori, bicker over immigration law, or work to comprehend a passage of Kant would be one that is worse at achieving academic excellence — its sine qua non.

Grounding our arguments around the core principle of academic excellence doesn’t solve them a priori, but it does transform them from intractable normative questions to useful empirical ones.

It would be surprising if one could talk Robin DiAngelo out of the need for affirmative action to address systemic racism, or Chris Rufo out of the opposite conviction. But it’s possible we may achieve some degree of mutual understanding in a discussion about how to balance meritocratic considerations with the benefits of diversity to measurable outputs like research and writing.

And, despite best efforts at incorporating Latin into the column, it’s probably futile to try to talk the editors of The Salient out of their conceptions of human flourishing. But we may close some ground in an empirical debate about what institutional design would be most conducive to veritas.

Although it’s impossible to predict the future, it’s a fair bet that Harvard will remain top of mind in our political debates. As myriad actors seek to impose their political projects onto our campus, it will serve us well to remember our core purpose.

Harvard is a school — that much isn’t up for debate.

Benjamin Isaac ’27, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House.