Make Harvard Happy Again

Today at Harvard, we are struggling with a culture of fear and contempt — one that has created a lot of unhappiness. But University leadership can do a great deal to change this culture and help pave the way for improvement across higher education.

I speak at many alumni events, where graduates celebrate their years at Harvard as some of the happiest of their lives. The reason for this is easy to understand: Alumni reflect on the love they had for each other, for their former professors, and for the intellectual growth they experienced by being exposed to strange new ideas at Harvard.

When I ask alumni how today’s Harvard differs from their own time, they often say they are baffled and saddened to see something that has replaced the love they remember: fear. They hear horror stories about “cancel culture” and angry activism directed toward ideological minorities; they read about students and professors ostracized or driven away entirely for considering impermissible ideas or holding forbidden political views. They see a narrowing range of academic freedom and empirical evidence that free speech at Harvard is in decline.

This fear is real. One student who previously served in the military told me that his extensive training in war zones prepared him to deal with fear, but nothing truly rattled him until he was contemptuously denounced for his conservative views by some classmates. Before you scoff at this, note that psychologists have found that being excluded from a group is literally painful.

In one classic experiment, participants had their brains scanned during a virtual ball-tossing game. When they were suddenly excluded from the game, there was intense activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a limbic region associated with the experience of pain.

This makes evolutionary sense: We should be averse to rejection to avoid behaviors that get us thrown out of our tribe and force us to wander the frozen tundra alone. Perhaps you object that there’s no frozen tundra at Harvard if you say you voted for a Republican in a class. Well, your ACC doesn’t know that.

The solution to the problem we face today is not to get rid of controversy or diminish disagreement. On the contrary, Harvard should be a marketplace of competing ideas. Agreement for the sake of agreeability is profoundly mediocre, like a market with just one product. Indeed, this is precisely the problem we face when activism trumps inquiry, creating the unchallenged ideological orthodoxy that has created the fear of disagreement in the first place.

Instead, we need heterodoxy, and even heresy — not as necessary evils to bear, but as adventures to enjoy and relish together.

To see disagreement and heretical ideas in this way requires a cultural renewal of the love — and happiness — our alumni so fondly remember at Harvard. We should encourage those seeking orthodoxy to look elsewhere. We want joyful free thinkers who bridge courageously across profound differences of viewpoint, as opposed to bonding over in-group ideology. We seek students, faculty, and staff who thrill at ideas different than their own, and who wouldn’t think to sacrifice love and friendship at the behest of dogmatists inside or outside the university.

This love is the antidote to fear. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote some 2,500 years ago, “Through love, one has no fear.” Five centuries later, Saint John the Apostle said the same: “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear.”

And today, neuroscience supports Lao Tzu and Saint John. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin reduces anxiety by lowering activity in the amygdala — the limbic structure dedicated to processing fearful and threatening stimuli. Oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone,” bonds us with others through (among other things) eye contact, touch, and warm interactions.

The problems we face don’t appear overnight, and neither will their solutions. To repair the damage done by the culture of fear, a proactive emphasis on happiness itself could help.

Student experiences and required readings could focus on positive psychology and related disciplines. Courses in these areas could be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum, as well as specialized fields from medicine to law. In my own experience teaching happiness here at Harvard Business School, studying the science and learning the habits that promote wellbeing brings out the very best in my students.

Perhaps there is a risk in all this, though: I can easily imagine the withering mockery from sophisticates outside our community at Harvard leadership’s newfound focus on love and happiness. We might even face a bit of tribal rejection in academia, which will give our own ACCs a little twinge.

But I have a prediction: They will follow. And then we will say that a better future started right here, when love drove out fear, and when we made Harvard happy again.

Arthur C. Brooks is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School.

His piece is part of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard’s column, which runs bi-weekly on Mondays and pairs faculty members to write contrasting perspectives on a single theme. Read the companion to Brooks' piece here.