Harvard wants the world to know it is taking open inquiry seriously again.
Last week, the Harvard Gazette ran a glowing report announcing that the university is “building momentum on open inquiry.” It showcased new workshops, training sessions for teaching fellows, dialogue exercises for first-year students, and online modules imported from the Constructive Dialogue Institute—all designed to teach students how to listen better, argue respectfully, and understand those who disagree with them.
As a Harvard graduate who cares deeply about the institution’s intellectual health, I wish I could say this represents a substantive shift.
The initiatives Harvard is touting are not meaningless; they may even prove helpful. But they are largely cosmetic. Harvard is confusing the aesthetics of open inquiry with the structures that make open inquiry possible. And in doing so, it risks masking the deeper, far more dangerous realities of its current academic climate while permitting administrators to claim progress they have not earned.
The Real Crisis
Harvard doesn’t have a crisis of conversational skills. It has a crisis of fear—fear among students, faculty, and researchers that certain ideas carry real social and professional risk. And that fear is documented.
Harvard’s own Report of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group (October 2024) makes the point plainly: 45 percent of students hesitate to share views on controversial issues in class; 51 percent of faculty and staff feel reluctant to teach such material; 41 percent are wary of pursuing research on politically or socially sensitive topics. These findings were reported not by critics but by Harvard Magazine and the Boston Globe, which noted widespread self-censorship across the political spectrum driven by peer judgment, social-media backlash, and career concerns.
External data confirms the pattern. In 2024, Harvard ranked 245th of 257 in FIRE’s Free Speech Rankings—its second straight year at or near the bottom—with twenty speech controversies since 2020 involving deplatformings, sanctions, or attempted disruptions. Fifty-three percent of students report self-censoring monthly.
These numbers are emblematic of a structural problem, not a dialogue deficit.
Why Faculty and Students Self-Censor—and Why Training Won’t Fix It
What Harvard Is Offering
The Gazette report highlights a faculty member leading a discussion with first-year students about “how we value our friends who disagree with us.” It also cites expanded training for teaching fellows through the Bok Center, new exercises in disagreement across the professional schools, and ongoing planning for a tool—developed with the Minson Constructive Disagreement Lab—to measure shifts in students’ disagreement skills over time.
These are not bad developments. They are welcome, actually.
But they reflect a belief that Harvard is facing a cultural shortfall rather than a structural one. If Harvard truly believes that a few hours of disagreement training can counteract the chilling effect produced by the institutional environment it has allowed to form, then it is more naïve than I thought—or perhaps simply more calculating.
Given the university’s public-relations pressures, its internal politics, and the national attention focused on campus culture, the temptation to announce visible, feel-good initiatives while avoiding the hard work of institutional reform is strong. And Harvard is embracing that temptation enthusiastically.
What Harvard Is Not Offering
Notice what Harvard did not announce.
It offered no protection for scholars pursuing controversial research, despite 41 percent of faculty and staff reporting reluctance to do so. There is no explicit tenure safeguard for rigorous but unpopular work, no ombudsman for faculty targeted by online campaigns, and no clear line between legitimate student feedback and attempted censorship.
Harvard has not adopted institutional-neutrality principles like the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report—frameworks embraced by Dartmouth, UNC, Claremont McKenna, the University of Alabama System, Kentucky, and others—precisely to create the structural space for the dissent Harvard claims to value.
There is no guarantee of viewpoint-neutral protest enforcement, even as speaker shout-downs have become routine. In the past year, students significantly disrupted two events and attempted to disrupt three more. After Rep. Jake Auchincloss criticized former President Gay’s testimony in December 2023, Harvard abruptly cancelled his already-approved event, an unmistakable signal about the cost of criticism.
There is no plan to broaden the faculty’s intellectual range, no acknowledgment that student evaluations can punish ideological deviation, and no commitment to public, annual climate reports tracking self-censorship, speaker disruptions, or departures linked to academic-freedom concerns. Instead, Harvard has offered a narrative—storytelling about conversation, empathy, and “the air we breathe”—without the structural reforms that would actually protect inquiry.
What Students Actually Need
Certainly, students can benefit from training in how to disagree. But that training only matters if it occurs in an environment where disagreement is actually protected and modeled.
Students need faculty who genuinely disagree with one another in their classrooms and departments—not staged disagreements in workshops, but real intellectual diversity that makes pluralism a lived reality rather than a slogan.
They need protection from reputational harm when they explore controversial ideas in good faith. They need assurance that intellectual experimentation will not be weaponized against them in anonymous forums or future job searches.
They need to see professors taking intellectual risks, teaching contested material, and being defended by the institution when they do so responsibly.
They need clear, consistent signals that Harvard will stand behind scholars and students who pursue rigorous inquiry, even—especially—when that inquiry produces uncomfortable conclusions.
They need confidence that the university’s commitment to open inquiry is not rhetorical but structural.
No dialogue module can provide this. Only institutional courage can.
The Cost of This Approach
The cost of Harvard’s approach is already measurable, even if the university refuses to measure it.
Research not pursued. Courses not offered. Scholars who leave or never apply. Students who graduate from America’s most prestigious university having never encountered genuine intellectual diversity in their classrooms—trained to navigate disagreement through workshops, yet never seeing their professors model real, consequential disagreement over ideas that matter.
Future senators, CEOs, judges, and policymakers are learning that the safest path is to avoid controversial topics rather than engage them. This is not preparation for democratic citizenship. It is training for intellectual conformity.
And the problem extends far beyond Harvard’s gates. When Harvard—perhaps the most visible university in the world—adopts a model in which “dialogue training” substitutes for structural reform, peer institutions will follow. The chilling effect already documented at Harvard will remain and spread; only now it will be obscured by a layer of well-marketed programming that allows administrators everywhere to claim progress without undertaking the reforms that truly matter.
The False Narrative of Progress
What concerns me most is not Harvard’s slow pace but its eagerness to announce progress where none exists. When the university claims reform without actually making any, it signals to alumni, trustees, and the public that the problem has been solved—even as the structures that caused the crisis remain untouched.
Workshops and dialogue sessions may be pleasant—even helpful—but they do not constitute institutional change. They reveal Harvard’s capacity for self-comfort, not its willingness to address the climate of fear documented in its own surveys. If observers leave believing that curated conversations amount to real repair, nothing will change: programming will expand, press releases will flow, and the fear will remain.
What Real Reform Requires
Protect faculty: Harvard needs explicit guarantees that rigorous but controversial scholarship cannot be weaponized during tenure, promotion, or contract renewal. It needs clear standards that distinguish inquiry from misconduct, and an ombudsman to protect scholars targeted by mobs, online or otherwise.
Adopt institutional neutrality: A university that takes political positions signals to scholars and students which viewpoints are preferred and which are suspect. A Kalven-style framework would restore confidence that dissent is not a liability.
Broaden intellectual hiring: A faculty that leans overwhelmingly in one ideological direction cannot create the pluralistic environment Harvard advertises. This is not about quotas; it is about credibility.
Enforce rules consistently: Protest and disruption policies must be viewpoint-neutral and publicly enforced. Harvard should publish annual data on speaker events, interruptions, and disciplinary outcomes: basic transparency that every serious institution should embrace.
Fix teaching evaluations: Harvard knows that student evaluations penalize faculty who teach charged material or hold minority viewpoints. It is time to treat that bias as a structural fact, not an anecdote.
Provide transparent accountability: One climate survey every decade is insufficient. Harvard needs annual reporting on self-censorship, faculty departures tied to climate concerns, speaker controversies, and how complaints are handled.
Defend dissent: Harvard must be willing to support scholars and students before reputational damage occurs – not after the noise has calmed and the message no longer carries risk.
The Challenge
President Garber: Will you defend the next faculty member who responsibly teaches contested material?
Provost Manning: Will you commit to publishing real climate data annually, not selectively, and allow the public to see whether conditions improve?
Faculty: Will you model the intellectual risk you ask of your students? Or will you continue to self-censor in the institution that claims to champion open inquiry?
Students: Will you demand structural guarantees—not just workshops—that allow you to explore ideas without fear?
Alumni: Will you accept a narrative of progress built solely on programming? Or will you insist on reforms that actually change behavior and incentives?
What’s at Stake
Harvard should defend real challenge and dissent. Teaching students how to “manage” disagreement is meaningless in an environment where dissent is punished. Harvard doesn’t need better breathing exercises—it needs to clean the air.
If it wants open inquiry to be the air students and faculty breathe, it must restore structural honesty rather than offer narrative comfort.
Image of Harvard University by Scarlet Sappho on Flickr
