Last year, in the midst of all of the turmoil on campus in the aftermath of October 7, I sat down to dinner with a Muslim friend. With so many of our peers facing threats of doxxing, she told me how stressful it was to even walk to class from her dorm along the river. She turned to me with a look of utter confusion and said, “I just don’t understand why this is happening.”
Growing up in the Jewish community, I understood where the fear and pain were coming from, just as I abhorred the reckless endangerment of my peers by people from outside the University. We had a long, teary discussion about traumas, both historical and present. We didn’t meet under the auspices of formalized “dialogue,” and we didn’t solve anything—far from it. But we hugged and agreed to continue to have meals together.
It seems “dialogue” is everywhere on campus these days. In response to the past year and a half of protests, backlash, and counter-backlash, the University has run damage control, creating new initiatives to fix the supposed crisis on campus. For undergraduates, one of the most visible and least understood has been the Harvard College “Intellectual Vitality” initiative. According to its glossy website, the program aims to build “a culture that celebrates honest inquiry and respectful disagreement.” The ethos of Intellectual Vitality, according to program fellow Ari Kohn ’26, is that “truth comes from an amalgamation of different experiences.”
While it was founded by students in 2021, before the explosion of controversy around the Middle East war, Intellectual Vitality has quickly become the face of the University’s efforts to “foster dialogue.” Its efforts—often student-run—might be well-meaning. But they also garner mockery. I’ve seen Intellectual Vitality used as a punchline at comedy shows on campus, standing in for all administrative efforts that seem clumsy and opaque. The jokes tend to focus on the name: nobody really knows what “intellectual vitality” means. The term implies the baffling idea that intellectualism is on life support; the capital-I Intellectuals are keeling over at their study carrels. For a program perceived as a balm to campus tensions, it seems to outwardly address a problem that doesn’t exist.
But even if you take it at face value, an imposed-from-above push for “intellectual vitality” runs into a significant roadblock: students and faculty haven’t agreed on which speech is vital, and which is verboten. We are trying to be open to free dialogue but often cannot agree on the terms of discussion, or on whether there are certain topics that cannot, should not, or need not be discussed. The debate over the war in the Middle East has tested our definition of free expression. Are there questions too incendiary to pose? Are there slogans too incendiary to chant? And what does it mean to have open and honest debate in this context?
The very status of free debate has never been this unstable. In my first year at Harvard, there was a sizable pro-life celebration in Tercentenary Theatre after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade. I saw my fellow classmates cheering and smiling in public, unhindered, for a viewpoint that I personally disagree with. Last year at Alumni Day, President Alan M. Garber was glitter-bombed by an animal rights protester. Neither of these events garnered significant, sustained public attention. After being attacked by gold glitter, Garber even affirmed the hope that free speech would continue to thrive on campus.
