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You’ve probably heard that Harvard is a progressive echo chamber. This bubble, it is said, hurts the University’s mission to foster dialogue and educate future leaders while bolstering the perception that it is dominated by liberal elites out of touch with Middle America.

We can’t have productive, critical dialogue, posit loner conservatives and reach-across-the-aisle-liberals, when the vast majority of us already agree on the issues. To them, the solution lies in changing the campus’ political makeup, bringing in more right-leaning perspectives by admitting more conservative students — in other words, affirmative action for conservatives.

All of this may be true. But conservative affirmative action — of any kind — suffers from serious issues with implementation, and it grossly oversimplifies what ideological diversity really means.

There are several ways Harvard might go about implementing this. Each faces serious challenges.

If Harvard sought to directly advantage students who self-report as conservative on their application, it would almost certainly face prospective applicants trying to game the system by falsely labeling their beliefs. Taking high school activities as a proxy for beliefs — leading a Young Republican club, say, or volunteering for conservative political candidates — could face the same system-gaming problem. Furthermore, such a method only selects for politically active students — not the far larger group of conservatives who hold conservatives views but do not engage in political organizing.

Another route, then, is for Harvard to recruit or favor applicants from backgrounds correlated with conservative beliefs, increasing outreach to applicants from rural backgrounds. At the same time, though, a major increase in preferences for rural applicants would also increase the proportion of admits that are white and Christian, putting downward pressure on diversity just as Harvard needs to do its utmost to ensure the reverse.

These methods to shape the admissions process towards a more favorable margin for conservatives are self-defeating. But they also reveal a broader truth about the status of politics as identity.

Political and intellectual views, unlike most other facets of identity we consider under the umbrella of diversity, are not immutable. Students can and do change their opinions.

That is not to say that such views do not shape the way we engage with the world, from the spaces we enter, to the friends we make, to the ideas we consider. But this form of conservative identity politics essentializes the spectrum of campus discourse into one large camp and another, much smaller camp.

Intellectual diversity cannot be boiled down to liberal and conservative; it encompasses a wide spectrum differing philosophies and perspectives. Indeed, as revealed in the past year — mostly pressingly, by the genocide in Gaza — there are deep political divisions on campus. To describe Harvard’s student body as a monolith is a vast oversimplification, one that totally ignores the essential dialogue happening right now.

The progressive echo chamber on campus may be real, but it doesn’t necessarily result from a concerted effort from the University or its students to marginalize conservatives from campus. The problem may well be out of Harvard’s control.

Whatever the case may be, it is important that students leave the “echo chamber” and examine ideas from various ideological perspectives, especially those that make us uncomfortable. To engage with differing perspectives in the real world, it’s a must.

But does this commitment extend to deliberately shifting the demographic makeup of our campus? I’m not so sure.

Andrew Q. Kang ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Dunster House.