Allison P. Farrell’s recent op-ed strikes a familiar note: it laments the supposed decline of conservative intellectualism while overlooking its persistence and evolution. Farrell’s dismissal of The Harvard Salient as unserious or reactionary betrays not insight into conservative thought, but a refusal to engage with it.

The truth is that conservative intellectualism did not die; it adapted. For decades, conservative faculty and students alike were slowly driven to the margins of the academy. Those who remained, clad in tweed blazers and horn-rimmed glasses, often played the agreeable foil, only to find themselves ignored or displaced. The modern conservative has learned a harder lesson: when an academy refuses to take argumentation or contrary evidence seriously, survival requires changing one’s style without abandoning one’s substance.

Farrell mistakes this evolution for decline. Yes, conservative writing today may be more polemical, sharper, even provocative. But the arguments themselves — about the permanent things, about the limits of ideology, about the dignity of faith, family, and nation — are the same ones articulated by Strauss, Scruton, or Kirk himself. The difference is that they are now delivered with a frankness proportionate to the stakes of our cultural moment.

Far from signaling conservatism’s exhaustion, this sharpened rhetoric reflects its resurgence. Farrell’s wish for conservatives to return to a quieter, more crushable form — ignorable, deferential, and, most importantly, conquerable — is precisely why we will not. Intellectual conservatism remains alive at Harvard, and though I write this in a purely personal capacity, I say it in the Salient’s pages too, not because it retreated into nostalgia, but because it has met the times with equal seriousness and greater resolve.

— Richard Y. Rodgers ’28 is the Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Salient.

Letters to the Editor must respond directly and explicitly to either an opinion piece recently published on the Editorial page, or else to The Crimson’s manner of coverage within any section of the newspaper. Letters that respond to the subject matter of a non-opinion Crimson article, rather than The Crimson’s coverage of that matter, will not be accepted.

Letters to the Editor are evaluated at the discretion of the Editorial Chairs. They should be submitted to editorial@thecrimson.com and should run between 150 and 350 words. We require Letters to the Editor to be signed, with the signatures appearing on the page or as a hyperlinked list at the discretion of the Editorial Chairs. We do not accept Letters to the Editor from organizations or anonymous writers.