Harvard To Host Comedian Jordan Klepper for Intellectual Vitality Event

Harvard College will host Emmy-winning comedian Jordan Klepper on Saturday night in an event promising both humor and serious dialogue on politics as the University faces continued pressure from the White House.

The conversation with Klepper is the Intellectual Vitality Initiative’s first sponsored speaker event of the semester and comes less than two weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Klepper is a correspondent on The Daily Show who spent several years chronicling conservatives’ reactions to Trump’s first presidential term. In a Tuesday interview with The Crimson, Klepper said he is excited to come to Harvard to gauge whether students have observed “emboldened conservative takes on campus,” noting that he has not been to a college campus since Trump’s re-election.

“There’s a lot that’s happened on a federal level in the last week and a half,” Klepper said. “I think a lot of people are taking a step back and trying to see, ‘How is this affecting people on a more localized level?’”

The event — co-sponsored by the Dean of Students Office and the Intellectual Vitality Initiative — will consist of a guided question-and-answer session moderated by Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and audience questions.

Though Klepper said he has not closely monitored responses by the University to Trump’s recent executive orders — which include mandates to cut Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at institutions including Harvard and an attempted federal funding freeze — he said he is an “open book” regarding the topics of Saturday’s discussion.

Intellectual Vitality Student Board co-chair Ariel F. Kohn ’26 said the student board — which consists of 11 students — was not involved in the decision to invite Klepper to Harvard.

Still, Kohn said the student board has been tasked with making the College’s commitment to intellectual vitality more accessible to students.

“One of the student advisory board’s charges is to make intellectual vitality less of an order from on high — something that’s inaccessible, something that only has bearing in the classroom — and to make it more translatable to the student experience,” Kohn said.

The Intellectual Vitality Initiative, championed by Khurana, was made public last spring amid intense student divisions over activism surrounding Israel’s war in Gaza and has since expanded its programming to College-wide events including a faculty-led dialogue series and freshman orientation sessions.

Kohn said the Intellectual Vitality Initiative’s future events “will definitely be much more serious and rigorous in tone,” but that she hoped the light-hearted spirit of the event with Klepper “resonates” with attendees.

“This is just one facet of intellectual vitality,” Kohn said. “Part of what we want to show is that we don’t need to force these kinds of conversations to happen.”

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not specify the focus of Saturday’s conversation, but wrote that the DSO is “committed to facilitating robust conversations around important topics and bringing together voices from across a series of perspectives.”

The event will take place in Sanders Theatre and is open to all Harvard ID holders.

While Kohn said she thinks the initiative’s “traditional approach is not going to be to have comedians,” she anticipates the conversation will be “really fun.”

“Our hope is that Jordan Klepper will — through his comedy but also perspective on being a comedian talking about very serious issues — engender that spirit in attendees,” Kohn said.

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.