Is Harvard Doing Discourse Wrong?

Harvard Newstalk

If you've been a student at Harvard at any point over the past three years, there’s one thing you’ve probably heard over and over again: intellectual vitality.

You’ll see it in emails, in videos, from students, from our deans — it’s everywhere.

And, overwhelmingly, you’ll get the sense that Harvard’s concerned about the state of discourse on campus.

So what is intellectual vitality? A Harvard website says it’s about the college’s attempts to “establish a culture in which all members speak, listen, and ask questions of each other and ourselves with curiosity and respect.” The implication here is that the college isn’t quite hitting the mark. That there isn’t as much curiosity and respect as there should be. That Harvard’s civil discourse isn’t intellectually vital.

And that’s meant that the college has rolled out measure after measure to try to change that. Hiring new people, putting on speaking events, getting students to talk about it with each other. And one of the newest phases of that came this fall, when intellectual vitality was included for the first time in mandatory training for freshmen entering the college and getting to know what Harvard is all about.

But some people think that Harvard’s approach to all of this is wrong. That its attempts at intellectual vitality aren't helping. That it’s missing the real point — and the real problem.

One of them, Matteo Diaz, is a student who was asked by a Harvard administrator to record a video for that training. He didn’t see what came of it until this fall, when he and one of his peers, Saul Arnow, saw that intellectual vitality training before it was shown to freshmen. Matteo and Saul are on The Crimson’s editorial board, and they join host Frank S. Zhou to talk about why they think Harvard is falling short.

This week on Newstalk: is Harvard doing discourse wrong?

Audio excerpted in this episode from the Harvard College YouTube channel and Harvard College Dean of Students YouTube channel.