Intellectual Vitality Really Is Vital. Here’s How To Do It Right.

Dice rolling in Harvard Yard. A training featuring roommates fighting over fruit. A cascade of emails from administrators. These and other efforts — some serious, some not — are part of Harvard’s recent push for “intellectual vitality,” through which the University has sought to answer some of the criticisms of the past year.

Any push for free expression will find in our Board a friend, and this one is no exception. But as it continues to ramp up, the intellectual vitality initiative has at times felt simplistic or performative. Lest this noble campaign lose its way, the University should commit to a definition of intellectual vitality without partisan baggage — and interventions capable of making real change.

Though not without valuable social scientific insights, “Perspectives,” the new required freshman orientation module, showcases the pitfalls of the College’s current approach.

At one point, the training encourages viewers to think about positive sum thinking through the “Parable of the Orange,” in which two roommates fight over an orange before realizing — thank god — one only needs the zest. At another, we’re treated to the story of the cancellation of a student body president who opposes immigration but turns out to have an open mind.

These examples aren’t noxious so much as they’re incomplete. In the real world, we all know situations involving free expression tend to be far more complex than a simple misunderstanding or a false dichotomy between one value and another.

And when “civil discourse” is invoked as an alternative to “cancel culture” — much less to justify the totally ad hoc punishment of student protesters — one worries that the University gives people the false impression that intellectual vitality is only for the right.

In truth, intellectual vitality isn’t partisan — it’s the challenging and mundane but ultimately essential work of learning how to engage with people who don’t already agree with us about everything. The shortcomings of Harvard’s speech culture can’t be distilled down to flashy slogans about “cancel culture” or “viewpoint diversity.”

Though unmentioned in the University’s many communiques about free speech — save for the tidy admin-speak euphemism “last semester’s events” — the past year has produced a host of challenges to free speech on campus worth confronting. From doxxing trucks, to congressional investigations, to Title VI lawsuits, tomass protest, to antisemitism, anti-Israeli bias, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism, we have plenty to work on.

In other words, none of this is cause to abandon “intellectual vitality” — it’s a call to do it right.

To begin with, Harvard can work to plug the holes in intellectual vitality trainings like Perspectives. Particularly useful would be guidance on how to navigate situations involving identity, which often prove the most difficult, and training and support for teaching fellows and untenured faculty. In smaller classes and sections, it’s these academic workers who will shoulder much of the burden of facilitating these hard conversations, with no guarantee they won’t lose their job if they say the wrong thing.

While students might learn the basics of intellectual vitality in trainings and presentations, there’s no substitute for practice, and that has to happen in the classroom. To its credit, the College has already taken steps to integrate these themes into General Education courses — an approach it would be wise to extend to introductory courses like Economics 10 or Computer Science 50. More creatively, Harvard might consider expanding the freshman seminar program or introducing current events seminars that offer the opportunity to directly engage the questions of the day.

We know firsthand how transformative conversation across difference can be. Intellectual vitality really is the spirit of a university. Harvard needs to make sure it gets it right.

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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