Administrative Reports Won’t Make Students Speak Their Minds

There’s an old story about a man whose boat springs a leak. At first, it’s just a trickle, so he scoops the water out with his hands. But the water keeps rising, so he grabs a bucket and bails faster. As the leak worsens, he works harder — frantically tossing water overboard, convinced that if he just keeps going, he can stay afloat. But no matter how fast he bails, the boat keeps filling. He never stops to patch the hole.

When it comes to campus discourse, Harvard finds itself in a similar predicament — and its latest efforts to manage the issue have been as revealing as they are absurd.

A Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee recently urged the University to assure professors that their outside speech will not affect their teaching assignments, while also recommending that instructors make clear to students that they will not be penalized for disagreeing.

If a university has to formally remind students and teachers that they are allowed to think for themselves, something has gone deeply wrong. Yet Harvard’s repeated administrative pronouncements will do nothing to stem the tide of ever-increasing concern over freedom of expression — only a serious cultural change, one that normalizes unreserved disagreement, can fix this issue.

The mere fact that the University feels the need to officially reiterate the value of classroom debate exposes a reality that no amount of administrative smoothing can disguise: Free inquiry at Harvard has become fragile, volatile, and in need of constant oversight. The intellectual environment is so brittle that the University believes that it requires faculty committees to legislate its continued existence.

In trying to appease every competing interest, Harvard has turned free speech into a logistical challenge to be controlled and refined. It apparently fears being seen as punitive toward faculty speech, yet also worries that professors’ outside opinions might make students feel hesitant to express their own views. It wants to protect expression while ensuring that no one feels unduly influenced. The result is an institution caught in a futile cycle of policy revisions, each meant to restore confidence but only confirming its absence.

That same Faculty of Arts and Sciences report also noted that only 35 percent of graduating seniors felt comfortable expressing opposing views about controversial class topics. Respondents cited concern about criticism from peers or fear of being branded offensive as top reasons why. You can lead a horse to water, the saying goes, but you cannot make it drink: No university-issued statement will make students confident enough to dissent if they believe the social cost is too high, and no faculty reassurance will convince a professor that their words will not be used against them when recent history suggests otherwise.

The hesitancy that defines campus discourse is clearly not the result of formal censorship; it is the product of a culture in which social mores mean speech has become too fraught to be exercised freely.

Nevertheless, Harvard keeps drafting regulations, as if memoranda alone can contrive an environment of free inquiry and intellectual resilience. But no rule can override the unspoken consensus that some arguments are simply too risky to make. As long as that consensus holds, the University will keep preaching to a student body that remains silent and a faculty that remains skeptical.

The only real solution to this crisis is to normalize unreserved disagreement. That does not mean cultivating an atmosphere of needless provocation. It simply means treating debate as a natural feature of academic life rather than a social and professional minefield to be navigated with extreme caution, if at all.

Professors should model this practice by engaging in open intellectual conflict, trusting that students are capable of grappling with difficult ideas. Students should abandon the habit of qualifying and hedging their opinions out of fear of misinterpretation. Both groups should stop apologizing in advance for remarks they have yet to make that could be perceived as offensive or jarring. With as few exceptions as possible, speech ought to be designed not to minimize hurt but to maximize learning.

These changes are not merely cultural corrections — they’re intellectual necessities. Disagreement requires far more cognitive effort than agreement. To challenge an idea, one must first understand it, engage with it, and formulate a coherent response. Agreement is passive; disagreement is active. Sustaining this type of rigorous intellectual conflict is the crux of a university’s mission.

Harvard cannot regulate its way out of this. The problem is cultural, not administrative, so no legislation will reverse it. In a campus climate where many assume disagreement is dangerous, the single most powerful thing anyone can do is to demonstrate that it is not.

The way forward is not more policies — it is simply to raise your hand in lecture or section and state, “I completely disagree with what you said, and here is why.”

Isaac R. Mansell ’26, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is an Economics concentrator in Kirkland House