Free Speech Is Alive and Well at Harvard. Why Aren’t Media Covering It?

Last month, myriad campus groups hosted the Harvard Conservative and Republican Student Conference. But unless you keep up with The Crimson, you probably wouldn’t know it.

Among the speakers featured were Steve Bannon — who just days later gave what appeared to be a Nazi salute at the Conservative Political Action Conference — and Amy L. Wax — a self-styled “race realist,” sanctioned by her home institution, who spoke about the importance of “a European majority.”

These speakers are high profile, and their beliefs are undoubtedly extreme. Yet — beyond college newspapers like ours — there was a notable lack of mainstream reporting on this event. After Harvard’s student protests against the war in Gaza and the resulting fallout received overwhelming coverage in national outlets, the relative radio silence surrounding this conference demands consideration.

If we truly believe that students should be free to explore controversial ideas at our universities, we cannot discriminate based on the content of these ideas. The media must commit to covering speech fairly.

Let me be clear: Though I could not disagree more strongly with most of the speakers invited to the conference, if conservative students want to invite controversial voices to speak, I still believe it is their right to do so.

Indeed, we should celebrate the fact that students feel safe hosting an event like this one. Students exploring their beliefs, speaking with public figures, and engaging in discourse is vital to a well-rounded and civic-minded education. This is how it ought to be.

But we don’t always apply this standard evenly. Mainstream commentators often criticize left-wing student protests, alleging that they are promulgating extreme ideologies. Meanwhile these same arguments seem to be seldom expressed when it comes to representatives of the far-right on campus.

Fair reporting requires consistency. If the media thinks that it’s newsworthy when students engage with ideas that lie significantly beyond the political center, so be it. But then media outlets must be consistent in how they cover extreme viewpoints across the political spectrum, on our campus and others.

And if the issue lies not with the extremity of speech, but rather its content, then it is truly astonishing that there has been next to no comment on the speakers that appeared at this conference.

All too often, the left is painted as the enemy of intellectual vitality at Harvard. There is a narrative that right-wing voices are villainized and excluded. This notion may arise, at least in part, because conservatives make up so little of the professoriate and student body.

But it’s safe to say that this conference complicates simple theories of left-wing censorship and extremism, both in terms of the media’s reaction and the pushback from students on campus – or lack thereof.

The on-campus response to the conference was truly remarkable; namely, unlike similar cases in years past, the event went off without any reported public protest from students. It’s hard to claim that Harvard is a fundamentally unsafe environment for conservatives when campus conservative organizations can invite such extreme speakers to Cambridge with little to no pushback.

As I’ve said, this is not a problem; we can celebrate that free speech is alive and well at Harvard. But that, all the more, means that we must be wary when we hear that conservative speech at Harvard is in danger — especially when media coverage applies an apparent double standard in determining what speech is extreme.

While the popularity of racist and xenophobic ideas among our peers and in society at large should worry us, the fact that they can be discussed openly should serve as a powerful comeback to accusations of a poor speech culture at Harvard.

Fostering a strong speech culture on college campuses and elsewhere requires that outside actors play their part. If the media takes an alarmist stance toward left-wing protest, it risks chilling speech in one direction. If the media under-reports controversial conservative speech, it risks letting some ideas spread under-the-radar, preventing the full and robust dialogue that occurs only when the conversation is open to all.

Promoting robust campus discourse isn’t easy. It only becomes more difficult when media outlets distort what we should see with our own eyes.

Allison P. Farrell ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Leverett House.