In April 2024, 200 students (across all class years) joined a town hall in Quincy dining hall to talk about their experience at Harvard: what is going well and what could be better? Brilliantly moderated by dedicated graduating seniors, students engaged in some “think, pair, shares” and flash polls.
The results: students feel overwhelmingly fortunate and proud to go to Harvard. They enjoy their classes and professors, the unparalleled access to resources and expertise, their close friends, brilliant peers, and the vast sea of opportunities awaiting them while they are here and beyond. But students also know that something is missing: this missing piece takes on a few different forms depending on who you talk to, but can be summed up by a few key concepts: a gulf of community values or sense of cohesion and sometimes a nagging question of what Harvard means, beyond the cache and unlocked doors. Students want to “do good.” They feel they have a responsibility to use these resources in service to society…but they don’t know what “do good” means.
I study political economy in Social Studies, and to me, Erich Fromm’s concept of the “escape from freedom” best encapsulates this moment both at a university-wide and national scale: At a time when young people are parched for answers, Liberalism and the liberal arts seems frustratingly underdeveloped and antiquated for providing purpose. Absent strong institutions to inform mores, we are left with the paralysis of choice. How should I shape my life, given the immense opportunities before me? Freedom and autonomy often come at the expense of authority and tradition. As the binding forces of traditions fade, the individual gains, but our communities often lose. The trends of nihilism, self-censorship and self-segregation reported in fora from this town hall to the senior survey echo the call for an “escape from freedom” to provide a sense of purpose and meaning to our lives and education.
There’s just one problem: Harvard is no exception to the near-universal rule that our values, what we consider good and bad, are hotly contested and different for each of us. Moreover, it is the process of discovering, choosing and revising what it means to “do good” that engenders true freedom and autonomy. With the escape for freedom whispering in our ears, it is of course, tempting to look for an easy way out: grasp onto financial success as a heuristic for “power”, fill your schedules to the brim with clubs, classes and organizations to quench our thirst for contribution, join movements we may or may not be aligned with to feel like we are on the right side of the moral divide, or, self-censor from hot issues altogether to avoid the mistake of not just being wrong, but being “bad.”
Freedom and opportunity by itself won’t answer the longings these students describe. Institutions like Harvard must engage in truly formative work—formative not of a singular answer or complete philosophy of the world (this would put education out of business) but of an attitude of humility, respect and curiosity, which creates the preconditions for formation and consideration of our own values, or what Professor Arthur Applbaum calls, “trying on different ends for size.”
Intellectual Vitality–meaning, a spirit of open and rigorous inquiry–is at the core of what it means to be affiliated with Harvard. Intellectual vitality recognises inevitable conflicts and choices in the process of values formation. It recognises that there can be no final answers to the question of how humans are to live together. Yet, we can still agree on underlying principles. If “citizen leaders” is the “why”, intellectual vitality is the “how”. It is how we can see ourselves embedded within Harvard: to see our individual responsibility for upholding the collective mission of this university.
Intellectual vitality helps us approach the thorny, life-long questions required of those living in democracy: what do we owe to our communities, to society, and how can our institutions enable us to act together without compelling us to think alike? How can the “dual mandate” of diversity and academic freedom reinforce one another, rather than act in opposition? How can we turn the precarity of this political moment into an opportunity to realize the fragility of the liberal arts and the responsibility we all have to the institutions that shape us?
Facing a specific practical challenge or opportunity, citizens and students must be prepared to think well about how to choose one course of action out of the possible alternatives. Citizens need to learn how to deliberate with others who have different perspectives and experiences. They need to be capable of evaluating different arguments and considering different needs as they consider the best possible course of action for the community as a whole. Intellectual Vitality asks students to understand their humanity and education through the lens of their work as citizens. Such questions illuminate the “citizen leader’s” perspective because they do not take the possibility of democratic self-government for granted. When we understand self-government as fundamentally questionable— as something that the long sweep of history suggests might not even be enduringly possible—then we are prepared to see our education with fresh eyes.
