Contributing opinion writer

Nicholas S. Brown

Latest Content


How Harvard Can Beat the Final Clubs At Their Own Game, Inclusively

Harvard’s proposed solution is for final clubs to have “no public parties.” This is the wrong solution. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis has famously said about speech, the remedy “to falsehoods and fallacies… is more speech, not enforced silence.” Similarly, the answer to discriminatory exclusive parties is not no parties, but more inclusive parties. Simply put, it’s time for Harvard to take parties seriously.


How To Change the World and Have Harvard Pay For It

Harvard has a yellow brick road. If you want to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, Harvard can help you do that. You need only follow the path (of course with a lot of personal effort).


It’s Time for Harvard To Ban McKinsey, Again

Essentially, Harvard protects its students while they are on campus yet has nothing to say when the companies that they invite to campus and introduce to students later abuse those students as graduates and deeply harm society. Harvard needs a new body associated with OCS that compiles information about the social impact and workplace environment of every company that hires more than one student per year and that shares this dossier with students before they go into campus interviews.


Dear Future Harvard Leftists

Outside of academics, you can find a like-minded leftist community at Harvard — but you might have to build that community. Passionate about Bernie Sanders’s call for a political revolution, nine students and I founded Harvard for Bernie to support his 2020 presidential campaign. None of us were well-acquainted beforehand and each of us lived in different Houses and dorms. Bernie’s explicitly pro-working class policy proposals, including housing, healthcare, and college for all, were what brought us together.


How Can Harvard Ask So Little of Us?

At a time when elite institutions are being attacked for not doing enough to serve the common good — even having their endowments taxed for the first time — it's time for Harvard to take its mission more seriously.


Confessions of a Harvard-Yale Arrestee

I realize that not many of us are in a position to invest, particularly in the depths of an economic crisis. Nonetheless, in a country where everyone is largely on their own to provide for a secure old age, we will all need to think about saving for retirement, and as we are often told, the sooner the better. If you do invest, take the time to make sure that you do not invest in fossil fuels.