Harvard Students Must Stand for Their Beliefs

After President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and 2024, a palpable sense of dread and despair engulfed our liberal-leaning campus. Professors cancelled classes and created places to “process the election;” All the while, students expressed general disappointment.

Following Trump's most recent victory, our campus feels quiet and inert.

This response is surprising. The Crimson’s Class of 2028 poll found that 83 percent of Harvard freshmen held an unfavorable view of Trump. Given the extreme disfavor of our current president, I would have expected Harvard students to play a more active role in fighting against his policies.

But that is not the case. Political protests — all too common in the past — seem to have dipped in frequency, indicative of a deeper campus melancholy. Instead of sitting idly by, students must stand for their beliefs — and there are plenty of methods from which to choose aside from protest.

To understand the extent to which Harvard’s activism culture has flagged, one need only examine the past.

Throughout Trump’s first term, Harvard was seen as an institution which vehemently opposed his presidency. In 2016, thousands of residents, including scores of Harvard students, protested Trump’s win in downtown Boston. Then, before he took office, student activists formed The Harvard Student Power Network in direct response to his election.

During his presidency, students continued to protest policies which they saw as contrary to their beliefs. Harvard students participated in protests during the Black Lives Matter movement and protested Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination and subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court.

Recently, a conservative conference hosted by Harvard Students in Cambridge received little by way of protest. The conference included Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor, and Amy L. Wax, both controversial right-wing figures. Wax, a tenured law professor at the University of Pennsylvania known for her radical views on race, was recently sanctioned by the university for her racial remarks. When Charles A. Murray ’65, another individual with controversial views on race, visited Harvard in 2017, many people protested his talk.

These concrete actions by Harvard students taken during Trump’s first term are now seemingly invisible.

I have overheard conversations of students on our campus in which they expressed upset at the result of the election, but their focus was on the disappointment they felt rather than a desire to do something about it.

Many Harvard students, and liberal Americans more broadly, seeme to be suffering from political fatigue. They may feel tired and unmotivated to fight against Trump yet again. I understand the sentiment, but the attitude speaks to a broader issue about how young students engage politically — it gives the impression that students believe that political change can only come once every four years.

It seems to me that students are quick to align themselves with a certain political party or candidate, seeing it as part of their identity and a necessary tenet of being an educated young adult. My fear, however, is that aside from using it as a form of identification, people do not seem to have a deep care for the actual issues at hand or fail to do anything about their opinions.

I will admit that I too sometimes fall prey to this mentality. We sometimes share our political beliefs in hopes of garnering approval or validation, but this is not how they ought to be deployed.

Our lack of action is all the more troubling given Trump’s ability to inflict devastating harm to Harvard now.

In his first month of his second term in office, Trump cracked down on immigration, reduced NIH funding, and deemed DEI on college campuses illegal.

These policies directly impact us. As a result of his immigration decisions, foreign students at Harvard could be at risk. The NIH funding cuts have jeopardized the future of research at Harvard, and threats to DEI could change the college admissions process entirely.

To be clear, I am not advocating for mass protest. I don’t believe it is necessarily productive or the key for change. What I do believe, however, is that students must realize that there are many ways to make an impact. They can write letters to elected officials, volunteer their time to organizations they find compelling, and have fruitful discourse with their peers about issues they deeply care about.

Whether we like it or not, people pay attention to what happens on our campus, and Harvard students can make a tremendous impact if we decide to stand up for the things in which we believe.

Having political beliefs is a good start, but in an age where belief doesn’t go far enough, students should — however difficult it may be — shift from disappointment to hope and action.

Miriam Goldberger ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Thayer Hall.