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Since I entered Harvard with the Class of 2025, it has begun a transformation far more fundamental than many people grasp.

Post-October 7th, the University has broken with a long-standing practice against meaningfully disciplining student protesters; forsworn most statements on social and political issues; pushed for more open and critical intellectual engagement; cracked down on programs and centers seen as excessively progressive; tightened grading and attendance policies to bolster academic rigor; and reoriented its diversity and inclusion office toward “community and campus life.”

Many have understood these changes as a response to pro-Palestine protest and the Republican assault on higher education, and that’s surely part of the story. But having led The Crimson’s opinion section through many of these developments, completed a senior thesis about the history of Harvard College since 1970, and spoken privately with many of the University’s most influential faculty and administrators, I write to say that a sweeping reevaluation is underway at Harvard today predominantly because the University’s leaders believe in it.

The decades-long evolution of the status quo we’re now departing makes the scope and the direction of this transformation clearer — and provides a timely reminder that even the worst excesses of the College today sprung from noble ideals with enduring value.

At the beginning of the 1900s, residential colleges stood in loco parentis (“in the place of the parent”) with respect to their students. Universities acted like parents insofar as they sought to maintain order and moral propriety among students through dress codes, curfews, restrictions on relations between men and women, and the like.

These intrusive rules gradually came under fire from students, who desired greater freedom and privacy — to be treated more like adults — and at Harvard, after the protests of the ’60s, they went defunct. In most histories of American higher education, this is where the story ends: Universities drew back, students became adults, and other debates — from labor issues to the literary canon to campus policing — moved to the fore.

My thesis contends that inattention to what replaced this paradigm has hampered our ability to fully understand the distinctive features of the modern university now at issue. The past 50 years have seen the formation of a new in loco parentis that is distinctively parental in a more modern mode — more compassionate, more supportive, more interested in students as unique and distinct individuals. The rise of this new model has made the social, emotional, and symbolic needs of students a central concern at Harvard College.

By examining thousands of archival articles from The Crimson, dozens of administrative reports, and miscellaneous other sources, I traced the emergence of this new in loco parentis in the context of three zones of undergraduate life: diversity and inclusion, curriculum, and mental health.

When it comes to diversity and inclusion, the University has spent the last two decades developing policy and infrastructure to better represent the distinct identities of minority students. Since 2000, Harvard has invested in diversifying the university’s portraits; renamed the position of House master to faculty dean; promulgated its first University-wide D&I policy; rewritten the alma mater; and begun issuing more vocal and empathetic statements on racial issues.

In the context of academics, the College sought to empower students to more freely choose their path. The last major curricular review, in the 2000s, reduced requirements and moved back concentration declaration while significantly expanding advising resources to better guide and support students.

Finally, mental illness, which figured as a relatively peripheral concern in the mid-’90s, became understood as a full-fledged crisis in the new millennium. In response, Harvard more than tripled its clinical psychotherapy resources and quietly undertook initiatives to improve students’ social lives and address alcohol and drug abuse.

Many of these changes may strike you as natural or obvious, but before they were made, they were anything but. Further, while these histories are particular, I believe similar stories have played out in many areas of the College — that it’s been remade by a new in loco parentis — and that what we are witnessing today is an unprecedented attempt to retrench its furthest advances.

Reread the list of changes at the top of this piece. Each substantially strives to reverse or qualify a practice developed to accommodate an understanding of students’ needs that emerged only recently. From personal conversations, I can say with confidence that many faculty and administrators now believe these practices to be too accommodating.

In some cases, I agree; in others, I don’t. My purpose here is not to evaluate these changes but rather to argue that they are neither unconnected nor mere ploys to placate the right. Quite the contrary, they have a shared logic that is sincerely affirmed by many important people at Harvard and poised to go much further in the years to come.

One thing almost everyone can agree on about Harvard is that it needs change. What, how much, and how fast are questions over which reasonable people can and will disagree. As that process unfolds, it would behoove us all to remember that these questions have a history.

It is easy to criticize the practices now under fire, and many deserve the criticism. It is harder, but perhaps more important, to recognize that those practices came into being because Harvard was once a colder, harsher, and more exclusive place. People of good will hoped to change that and largely succeeded but left new problems in their place.

The truest thing I can write about Harvard is that I have loved it. It has made me smarter, better, truer, and happier. It has given me friends I love so dearly that every attempt to tell them this these last few weeks has fallen short.

Harvard is a wonderful place to live and learn. It can be made better, yes — I have dedicated much of my time here to contemplating how — but it is very good, and it is good in no small part because it has become kinder. However necessary the improvements to come, whatever Harvard emerges from them, let it still be kind.

Tommy Barone ’25, a former Crimson Editorial Chair, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.