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Harvard Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Bharat N. Anand said the University is encouraging teachers to broach controversial subjects in classrooms at a Harvard Graduate School of Education virtual event on Thursday.
He spoke alongside Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and President of Baylor University Linda A. Livingstone. The panel is part of HGSE’s EducationNow series and was moderated by Francesca Purcell, a lecturer at the school.
Anand, a professor at Harvard Business School, said University officials began discussing how to respond to a “reluctance to express views” among students and faculty about three years ago.
He said that then-Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow convened a task force with faculty from the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School to study Harvard’s speech culture. The group found “widespread” concerns, according to Anand.
“Faculty and staff expressed similar concerns, and they were not limited to in-classroom concerns about expression,” Anand said. “It was also about out of classroom expression.”
He added that self-censorship — for fear of conflict and reputational damage — was identified as a particular source of concern.
“It’s trying to encourage those who don’t feel that they can express themselves and that self-censorship is voluntary,” Anand said. “But it’s pervasive, and it has many layers.”
The University has been widely criticized in recent years for both speech policies and a perceived lack of ideological diversity. After a year of exceptional protest activity, Harvard officials have launched a series of initiatives aimed at improving dialogue and understanding the campus speech climate and academic freedom.
Livingstone also said that ideological bias contributes to students’ self-censorship depending on the campus.
“What we have to work on on our campuses is helping our faculty and our staff know how to create an environment where students feel like they can say what they believe and have conversations around their views that allows them to learn and grow and develop and to think critically about those ideas,” Livingstone said.
Anand described the conflict between academic freedom as a “public good” and freedom of expression as an “individual right.”
“Academic freedom, ultimately, is the mission of the University, which is what we all do — trying to create and disseminate knowledge and the pursuit of truth,” Anand said. “But that also means respect for the dignity of others.”
Livingstone and Anand agreed that universities need to be consistent with their policies and perspective on free expression.
“Simply asserting the right to free expression doesn’t work,” Anand added. “Initiatives that are perceived as one off often fade out.”
Anand said “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times,” a Gen Ed course taught by Michael J. Sandel, was a good example of an environment conducive to free speech.
“When you look at the survey results in that course, 90 percent of students say they feel perfectly comfortable expressing themselves,” Anand said.
Anand compared the Justice survey results to data collected as part of the College’s 2023 and 2024 Senior Surveys. In 2023, 45 percent of graduating seniors said they felt free to express their opinions on controversial topics. Last year, only one third of graduates felt the same.
“How can we exploit that variation? We have 3000 faculty at Harvard,” he said. “How can we exploit that variation to learn about what’s happening effectively so that we can teach and inform ourselves?”
Anand added that faculty members can help Harvard “understand contextual boundaries.”
“They make us vulnerable, but they also allow us to literally share these ideas with each other,” he said. “I think that’s really powerful, meaning to not look at the campus as one unit of analysis, but as 3,000 units of analysis.”
— Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.
