Want Better Harvard Debates? Make Rhetoric Mandatory.

After arguably the most tumultuous year in Harvard’s history, for all the pundits got wrong about our campus, they were right about one fact: Harvard has failed at fostering a rigorous, expansive, and productive discourse. Fortunately, one new course may hold the answer.

Expository Writing 45: “Building a Resilient Community: Dialogue and Deliberation for Civil Discourse” — offered for the first time this year as an elective offshoot of the writing program’s public speaking practicum — seeks to provide just that. The course, as described in the course catalog, “is focused on developing civil discourse skills for engaging in meaningful dialogue, the basis for strong, resilient communities that can hold diverse viewpoints.”

I’m enrolled in the class and see its potential. Students are taught to read a subject, understand their emotional drivers, internalize them, and speak to them directly. They’re also encouraged to carefully weigh the emotional and experiential pillars that underlie their own beliefs and behaviors. Fundamentally, this is a course in building bridges across ideological divides — and doing so with compassion, intention, and tact.

And with a community as diverse as Harvard, these skills are inevitably necessary to engage with the campus’s disparate views.

Each year, Harvard draws together thousands of students. We come from almost every conceivable background — every corner of the world, every rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Some are the first in their families to attend college; others are the products of dynasties. We speak in different native tongues, pray to different gods, and follow different ethical compasses.

And in that miraculous variety of backgrounds and beliefs lies Harvard’s greatest promise: the kernel of its potential.

This University bundles bright and eager people from the full breadth of human experience, houses them in the same dorms, mandates they eat in the same dining halls, and holds its breath hoping the experience living together is “transformative.” The conversations that happen at Harvard and peer institutions lay the foundation for progress — not just within academia, research, and the sciences — but for countries and society writ-large.

This school endeavors to rear the next generation of citizens and citizen leaders, who are then expected to use their varied experiences and passions in the service of the whole. Each blade sharpening another.

But the quest for such exchange on our campus is arduous.

Perhaps, in a time when Harvard plucked its ranks from the New England elite, the pursuit of a rigorous intellectual process — or at least the appearance of one — was facile. When students attend the same preparatory schools, practice the same faiths, speak with the same inflections — constructive debate as an aesthetic exercise is no miracle. It’s an inevitability.

This is the old, static, homogeneous Harvard — one I imagine those national conservatives mourn when they assail a modern liberal arts education.

Harvard is big now. We grew up and branched out. By virtue of our diversity, this University is now, more faithfully, the embodiment of human excellence. But in providing for a vibrant, broad, and confident market of ideas that engages and capitalizes on the full scope of opinion assembled here, Harvard has fallen pitifully short.

But not irreparably so.

Harvard must give its students the tools we need to engage considerately, carefully, and constructively. Students here are in desperate need of a common language for discourse and a shared objective. Dialogue and deliberation for civil discourse should be a mandatory component of undergraduate study.

This does not look like a community or institution-wide ideological realignment. It should not mean granting credence to the objectionable nor stifling the unpopular.

Rather, Harvard should teach its students how to write and speak in argument with shared candor, grace, and self-awareness. Just as freshmen are all similarly instructed in academic writing through their expository writing requirement, sophomores at this college should be expected to continue their education in civil dialogue and rhetoric. And that education should be purposeful and practical.

Expos 45 has the potential to imbue students with the strength to be open and vulnerable to new perspectives. Thorough instruction in considerate, empathetic, and willing conversation holds tremendous power. Not just to make us more effective speakers and listeners — but collaborators in the pursuit of shared truth.

These skills will not just equip Harvard’s students to expand and shape the discourse on campus — they will enable us to lead lives of purpose and progress well beyond Harvard’s gates.

Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.