{shortcode-2ece9bbb916e3af19bf2e6c559ef8b3c6ecdd969}

At two recent events hosted by Harvard’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative, faculty debated the University’s response to the Trump administration while attendees followed a single rule: They could learn from the discussion, but nothing said could be attributed to anyone by name.

Under the Chatham House Rule, a diplomatic convention dating back to the 1920s that has taken root at Harvard in recent years, participants may use and share the information discussed after an event, but they may not disclose the identities or affiliations of the speakers.

At Harvard, at least four schools — the Business School, the Law School, the Kennedy School, and most recently Harvard College — have adopted the Chatham House Rule in their classrooms. At least two centers that host regular lectures and panels, the Intellectual Vitality Initiative and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, have embraced the practice.

Events under the Chatham House Rule have gained traction as Harvard struggles with what administrators and many faculty have cast as an epidemic of self-censorship. A Faculty of Arts and Sciences report from January found that 51 percent of graduating seniors and 46 percent of FAS faculty would feel uncomfortable discussing controversial topics in class.

The recent events — on topics spanning the White House’s new compact for higher education, the consequences of Harvard’s adoption of a controversial definition of antisemitism, and the Trump administration’s trade and investment policy — embraced one possible solution to the problem. Many featured panels of tenured faculty. But all of them took place under the condition that no one’s statements would be matched with their name.

Edward J. “Ned” Hall, the faculty advisor of the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, said the format was designed to encourage candid discussion among participants who might self-censor in public forums.

“There’s a lot more kind of conscious effort being put into events like this in order to make them spaces where, as much as possible, participants feel comfortable exploring ideas without worrying about facing some kind of reprisal for the content of what they say,” Hall said.

The uptick in events comes at a moment when pressure from the Trump administration has caused some students — especially international students worried about their visa status — to keep quiet on political issues. The Intellectual Vitality Initiative began hosting events under nonattribution rules in part to ensure international students could “fully participate in the intellectual community at the University,” said Jack P. Flanigan ’27, a student co-chair for the initiative and a former Crimson Editorial editor.

But faculty who have helped organize panels under the Chatham House Rule did not single out the Trump administration as their primary reason for using the policy. Instead, they pointed to longer-term factors: the lightning-fast spread of information on the internet, rising political polarization, and animosity on campus over the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Gaza.

Speaking openly on campus became more fraught for students as a result of “a whole tissue of behaviors that arose after Oct. 7 that are not limited to one particular side — I’m not talking about things that are limited to pro-Palestinian students or pro-Israel students,” Derek J. Penslar, the co-chair of the presidential task force on antisemitism, said.

“Polarization and rancor surround us, and there are students who are afraid to express their political views,” he added.

Hall pointed to the rise of cancel culture and social media doxxing in the past decade.

“I’ve heard plenty of stories from students about different social media platforms getting hijacked in ways that are really kind of ugly, where someone will incite a mob on the given platform to call out someone who they think has said or done something that they disagree with,” he said.

“It’s also worth noting that polarization in the country as a whole has become both broader and deeper over that time period,” Hall added.

Former College Dean Rakesh Khurana, who spearheaded the creation of the Intellectual Vitality initiative, said the Chatham House Rule enables faculty members to speak from perspectives that may differ from their personal beliefs or those of the institution they represent.

Khurana described the rise in events abiding by the Chatham House Rule as a “diffusion” of existing practices from the University’s graduate schools and faculty meetings to the College level.

Harvard Business School has maintained a nonattribution policy for years, then beefed it up in fall 2024. The Law School adopted the Chatham House Rule for class discussions in 2020 to protect students from harassment for their in-class remarks. It was adopted shortly after an incident where a student was shamed online for cleaning a gun during a Zoom class — a moment that ricocheted around the internet after it was captured in a screenshot.

And the Kennedy School and the College took up nonattribution rules more recently, in 2024 and 2025 respectively, as national media attention and protests over the war in Gaza rocked campus.

Harvard Kennedy School professor Matthew A. Baum — a member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a faculty group —said the Chatham House Rule makes it easier for people to speak openly. But he described the rule as “a band-aid, in a way.”

“It’s a way to allow more to occur in an environment where there is insufficient trust for it to otherwise occur,” he said. “It doesn’t fix the insufficient trust problem.”

—Staff writer Sidhi Dhanda can be reached at sidhi.dhanda@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sidhidhanda.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.