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2025 is hardly the first year Harvard has faced vocal criticism.

But amidst billions of dollars in federal funding freezes, demands for ideological oversight of admissions and hiring, and the prospect of a potentially crippling endowment tax on the horizon, it’s the first time our critics wield both the power and popularity necessary to threaten the University’s very existence.

Facing this prosecution in the court of public opinion, Harvard’s defense has rested largely on its contributions to scientific knowledge. In many ways, for good reasons — research into detecting and curing disease or advancing technological progress is self-evidently worthwhile and has been one of the first casualties of Trump’s cuts to federal funding.

And yet, staking the case for Harvard on what’s least controversial about our University elides genuine discussions of the elements of our work that are controversial in the public imagination — and that warrant a thoughtful internal discussion of how to improve. What is the place of academics in undergraduate life? Who should Harvard admit? What kind of speech culture should we cultivate? How should our graduates dedicate their talents beyond our gates?

Instead of nuanced answers to these questions, we’ve heard the airwaves dominated by simplistic, harmful narratives about students who can’t complete — or just don’t care about — their coursework, an admissions process that illegally manufactures racial diversity, or omnipresent cancel culture that suffocates the free exchange of ideas.

We on the Editorial Board have spent the last year discussing — and actually living — the Harvard experience that many pundits comment on from afar. And we’d like to set the record straight. Harvard’s shortcomings — just like its successes — are numerous. But we’d all do well to start by accurately identifying some of the places where Harvard actually needs improvement.

Academics

If your main source of information about Harvard’s academics is the White House, or even some segments of the popular press, you might think our student body is dominated by those who are ill-equipped to handle their coursework, or simply don’t want to.

But in our experience, Harvard students are still talented and academics are hardly a walk in the park. Indeed, an analysis in one Crimson op-ed published this year suggests that our students spend significantly more time on their classes than the national average.

Still, Harvard’s academic culture is far from perfect — though, the problems in our classrooms are more subtle than the headlines might make them seem.

For one, our University — like the rest of the world — is coming to terms with the inattention crisis wrought by digital technology. Sitting in a crowded lecture hall was never a constant thrill-ride, but the ubiquity of laptops and phones tailor-made to monopolize our attention has only made it that much harder to learn without distraction. The solution isn’t a top-down technology ban from University Hall — but we have called on our classmates and professors to think carefully about policies and practices to limit device use in the classroom.

For another, Harvard students are, in our experience, largely hardworking. But 2024-2025 was the year the University began actively intervening in what exactly students spend time working on. From a new policy formalizing penalties for students who miss two weeks of class to a bombshell faculty report that found some students “do not prioritize their courses,” the University took welcome steps to encourage students to ensure academics don’t play second fiddle to pre-professional pursuits.

Some purposeful moves to increase rigor, not for its own sake, but to enhance learning are worthwhile. But the University needs a more fundamental reckoning with its pre-professional culture if it’s serious about emphasizing academics.

Finally, for all the bluster about our professors’ political inclinations, our curricular concerns this year have been far more quotidian. Harvard’s efforts to expand multi-disciplinary offerings are often useful, but we’ve worried that the pursuit of interdisciplinarity has, at times, become an end in itself, rather than a means of generating new knowledge. Similarly Harvard’s General Education Program — the closest thing we have to a core curriculum — is in need of greater breadth and depth.

We would be the first to admit that Harvard’s academic culture could always improve. But the issues we’ve encountered in our classrooms have been far more mundane than most critics let on.

Still, that doesn’t mean they’re any less important. Access to a Harvard education is a privilege — one that entails the responsibility to develop our talents to serve the world once we leave.

Admissions

Tune in to a major news station or popular podcast and you’re likely to hear a common refrain: Harvard is too expensive, and its admissions programs center on DEI, not merit. Besides the fact that Harvard’s diversity-based admissions practices are now markedly illegal, the problem with Harvard’s admissions practices isn’t that the College’s high sticker prices prevent meritorious students from attending or that race-based selection exists — it’s that Harvard admissions prefer the privileged, lending credence to accusations of elitism.

We’ve called over and over for Harvard to reform admissions — both on its own merit and to combat perceptions of elitism. It might surprise you to learn that while Harvard touts its incoming classes’ racial and geographic diversity, it chooses not to release a robust measure of admits’ socioeconomic status.

The first step Harvard can take is by actually giving us the numbers: Alongside obfuscating admits’ racial backgrounds in light of the strikedown of affirmative action, the College has yet to provide public statistics on the breakdown of its admitted and incoming classes by socioeconomic bracket. What does the College wish to hide?

In another seemingly good-faith effort to make Harvard more affordable, the College improved financial aid this year, lowering the family income threshold for students to pay no tuition or go to Harvard completely free. Making Harvard more affordable is always good. But if Harvard’s high yield numbers signal anything, affordability isn’t the main concern: It’s recruitment.

Class socioeconomic breakdowns would likely concretize what we might surmise from the University’s feeder school obsession and studies by Harvard’s own professors: Harvard is still a school that selects for the already-fortunate. It seems that the University has caught on, as evidenced by a smattering of programs intended to recruit students from Middle, rural, and underprivileged America. These are good starts — but there is clearly work to be done.

Perhaps the easiest and most common sense solution is for the College to eliminate its archaic legacy admissions practice, a significant contributor to the College’s socioeconomic diversity woes. And if Harvard won’t, maybe Massachusetts should do it in their stead.

Now more than ever, it is within Harvard’s interest to make the changes some — including our Board — have been pushing for years: democratize admissions and restore Harvard’s image in the process.

Speech

Many have had much to say about Harvard’s speech culture (including ourselves, one year ago). To many, Harvard is a cesspool of radical wokeism, extinguishing any trace of conservative thought and championing anything progressive. Group after group has found in survey after survey that students often feel uncomfortable voicing their opinions, an effect sometimes disproportionately felt by conservative students.

But the problem is far more complicated: Twin task forces — one on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias and another on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias — discovered that students with opinions on both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate felt as though they could not share their own. It’s not about right or left. It’s about a broader issue of comfort with discomfort, a willingness to engage, and the institution’s role in promoting (or repressing) both.

Harvard’s administration has thrown the kitchen sink at the problem. Over the year, the College ramped up “intellectual vitality” initiatives aimed at improving speech and campus culture. They’ve instituted intellectual vitality trainings, plethoras of events, and several working groups tasked with some facet of the problem.

As a Board dedicated to the ideal of respectful disagreement, we’ve been broadly in support of such measures — even when they veer slightly off course, as evidenced by a training module centered around how to share an orange.

Often, though, the University has been on the mark. The University’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue group released its recommendations included several good ideas, including implementing the Chatham House Rule in classrooms, an agreement not to attribute sentiments shared in the classroom with a broader audience.

To create the forums for such discussion, Harvard should offer coursework on relevant topics — Including Jewish studies and Palestine studies — with dedicated faculty and teaching fellows trained to lead controversial discussions. The University must also ensure its actions don’t impinge on speech, a goal Harvard’s antisemitism settlements and overly-prohibitive actions taken against protesters have circumvented.

But the most crucial portion of any intellectual vitality initiative can’t be enacted by far-away administrators. It is up to students to decide that their peers — regardless of their opinions — deserve respect and that difficult and uncomfortable discussions are worth having.

Setting the Record Straight

Harvard’s fiercest critics aren’t wrong to interrogate us; they’re wrong to stop at the caricature. The truth is both more complicated and more hopeful. Our academics aren’t a joke, but we still owe students a culture that prizes attention over distraction and learning over resume-padding. Our admissions office isn’t a DEI fever dream, but we still owe the nation a class that’s less gated by zip code and prep-school pedigree. Our speech climate isn’t a totalitarian dystopia, but we still owe one another the courage — and the curiosity — to contend with ideas we despise.

None of these debts will be paid by defensive press releases or another round of task-force PowerPoints. They will be paid only by the hard, communal work of building a Harvard that is both excellent and broadly, unapologetically egalitarian.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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