Fixing Classroom Discourse Starts in the Q Guide

After a year of committees, action plans, and panels, Harvard’s commitment to their “intellectual vitality” initiative is clear. Yet their most substantive reform for addressing problems with our campus discourse is their pursuit of metrics to identify and quantify the problem.

Last semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences added two new questions to the Q Guide assessing the rigor of classroom discussions. The first prompts students to describe the course’s openness to diverse viewpoints; the second asks how comfortable students felt expressing their own opinions on controversial subject matters.

Though these questions provide improved data to administrators concerned about chilled speech environments, they fail to consider how a students’ perception of openness depends upon the politics of the participants themselves. Effectively understanding the dynamics of classroom conversations requires a third question asking students how closely their beliefs align with the rest of the class.

The problem with the current question design is straightforward: Students may conceivably self-segregate into classes where they face little ideological opposition and where they feel comfortable contributing to discussion. In evaluations of these courses, they likely describe the conversations as open.

But the fix is simple as it is potent.

By asking students how closely their beliefs conform with those of their classmates and their instructor, the administration can discern which classes succeed at making space for opinions that differ from the dominant ideology of participants.

If students describe significant comfort expressing viewpoints in a philosophy class, but those viewpoints are all roughly aligned, then that class is certainly not intellectually vibrant. If students who differ greatly from the dominant ideology still feel comfortable expressing their views, then that class succeeds at fostering rigorous dialogue. To make these judgments at all, we need data.

This proposal isn’t just sensible — it’s necessary.

Orientation modules, events, classroom discourse policies like the Chatham House rule — these are all neat top-down measures. But they’re hardly sufficient. Indeed, on their own, projects like these are meaningless, perhaps even distracting and destructive when pursued fanatically.

To achieve a truly healthy campus discourse, students and teachers must commit to making their classrooms and discussions intellectually vital. And what students and teachers desperately need is something concrete to guide them — not ambiguous initiatives and big words. Data about the state of discourse in the classroom is a good start.

If students truly believe they will benefit from confronting diverse voices — and being active participants in the academic project — as much as they care about course syllabi and workloads, then students will value these intellectual vitality questions as much as the rest of the Q Guide.

And by tracking how much enrollment responds to the Q Guide’s intellectual vitality scores, we can assess exactly how much students actually care about the health of discourse in their classrooms.

With intellectual vitality Q Guide metrics, professors can be rewarded for fostering open discussions, students can more easily select courses that will afford them the environment to voice countervailing perspectives, and administrators will succeed at creating the intellectually vital university they promise.

Harvard’s top brass can opine all they like about the merit of viewpoint diversity in the academy. But if we’re going to build an intellectually vibrant and diverse academy, we’re going to need to start with metrics that help us achieve that.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government Concentrator in Winthrop House.