But by December of 1999, this advocacy for democracy in China had all but died. That was the real news.

The Wang Dan incident was the first in a series of events indicating that Harvard and its students would continue to develop an increasingly close relationship with China, in spite of the country’s ongoing anti-democratic government policies.

Recent evidence pointing to this change includes the Kennedy School of Government’s new program to train hundreds of mid-level Chinese civil servants and University President Lawrence H. Summers’ May trip to China where asking for to be released from prison a Harvard graduate student and pro-democracy political dissident was secondary to the goodwill mission.

When I sat down to write the Wang Dan story, I had trouble contextualizing the lack of a campus response because I had a diminutive institutional memory about Harvard and China that extended only to when I enrolled as a first-year.

My experience writing about Wang Dan indicates that current Harvard students—even Crimson reporters and editors—are often ill-equipped to effectively hold the University accountable because they lack the institutional memory that helps us see the proverbial forest through the trees.

And so as seniors prepare for Commencement, our impending departure does not mean we are giving up our responsibility to ensure that the University lives up to its professed standards of academic liberty and tolerance.

The alumni’s knowledge of Harvard as an evolving institution is critical to protecting freedom at Harvard. A willing engagement with campus events on behalf of the many alumni better ensures that the University will continually strive for veritas.

Joyce K. McIntyre ’02, a history and literature concentrator in Kirkland House, was an executive editor of The Crimson in 2001.