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Comparative religion professor emerita Diana L. Eck — who helped develop Harvard’s framework for pluralism last year — said at a Harvard Medical School talk on Wednesday that she was heartened by Harvard’s embrace of the concept in recent months.

But Eck, a scholar of religion in the United States and India who helmed Harvard’s Pluralism Project for more than three decades, struck a cautious tone on whether the University’s new initiatives would be effective.

“The president may have decided that pluralism is the next big framework for thinking about the University,” she said. “How we live into that is really up to us.”

Eck’s talk, which was organized by HMS’s Office for Culture and Community Engagement and offices within the School of Dental Medicine and School of Public Health, took up a topic that Harvard has boosted even as it shifts from the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But Eck said she saw pluralism as a way to recognize and reckon with diversity, not to replace it.

“Pluralism has become the new buzzword, and we’ll see how long that lasts and what it comes to mean,” she said. “Because it is something that you have to create. It is not bestowed, and it needs to be created, partially by incorporating this diversity of voices into our educational framework.”

Eck was appointed by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 in winter 2024 to serve on the University’s task force on combatting anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian bias, which was convened alongside a task force on combating antisemitism and anti-Israel bias as Harvard reckoned with rifts over the war in Gaza. The twin task forces released their reports in April, laying out lengthy recommendations alongside detailed accounts of hostility on campus.

One set of recommendations — written by a joint subcommittee that included Eck — called on the University to establish “an organizational focal point for pluralism work.” Since the report’s release, Harvard has leaned into programming on pluralism and established a new presidential initiative on interfaith engagement.

But the changes have been accompanied by the closure and rebranding of Harvard’s diversity offices — a departure from the subcommittee’s recommendations, which suggested pairing pluralism programming with existing diversity initiatives.

On Wednesday, Eck said that the dismantling of diversity offices has taken place “basically at the behest of the Trump administration, not only in universities, but in corporations, in the military and other places as well.”

“Everything has sort of changed its name. There has been what some have called a pivot to pluralism,” she said. “Who knows how long it will be before pluralism itself comes under attack?”

Eck said that diversity was a fact of American life, not something that could be rolled back through a political push — but said that diversity without attempts to build cross-cultural understanding, risked yielding “increasing tensions in our society.”

Pluralism strives to go beyond tolerance or the simple fact of diversity, Eck said. Instead, she said, it seeks to build dialogue across cultural lines and answer the question of “how to engage with that diversity, what to make of it.”

In Wednesday’s talk, Eck described the origins of her own interest in pluralism during her junior year at Smith College in 1965, when she decided to study abroad in India at Banaras Hindu University. There, she was immersed in Hindu and Muslim religious traditions — an experience that convinced her to switch her major.

“The more time I spent there, the more I realized that I actually wanted to study religion,” she said.

When she returned to the United States, she found a society in the middle of its own reckoning over civil rights and discrimination — and on the cusp of major demographic change after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed reforms abolishing caps on immigration based on national origin.

Eck began teaching at Harvard in 1976, and she said that by the late 1980s, she began to see shifting campus demographics reflected in the composition of her own comparative religion class.

“I had Hindu kids in the class who had gone to summer camp in the Poconos,” she said. “I had Muslim kids who had been to Muslim youth leadership camps in Chicago or elsewhere. So the campus itself became so much more diverse.”

The shifts she observed prompted her to convene a seminar of undergraduate and graduate students that traveled to religious sites around Boston. The work expanded into mapping world religions across Boston — an initiative that Eck and the Pluralism Project have continued to this day.

“Mind you, this is a couple of years before Netscape Navigator arrived, so we couldn’t really Google this,” she said. “So we had to find out where people were worshiping and living, and it was sort of by word of mouth.”

Eck said that she did not think her teaching or the Pluralism Project would produce agreement all the time. But she said that her work was founded on the idea that “we do need to know more about one another.”

“We can have a society in which everyone belongs and has a stake in who ‘we the people’ actually are,” she said.