Jack Flanigan is a junior in Pforzheimer House concentrating in Social Studies. Jack’s interest in Intellectual Vitality stems from his experiences of robust and rigorous discourse in spaces from high school to Harvard. He is excited to articulate intellectual vitality as a central tenet of the College’s mission, and to continue to explore how intellectual virtue relates to Harvard’s responsibility to morally and civically form its students. Jack is also interested in the College’s obligation to foster a culture of rigorous, engaged, and compassionate discourse on campus, and how this obligation might be informed by a broader understanding of the university as a site of knowledge production, interpersonal connection, and civic learning and engagement.
In the 2024-5 school year, Jack served on the Student Advisory Board’s Principles and Communication working group, which refined the SAB’s vision of an intellectually vital campus, published in The Harvard Crimson, and crafted communications materials to publicize the ideas and ideals of the Intellectual Vitality Initiative. Jack’s membership on the Principles and Communication working group nested neatly with his research interests, which center on how groups discover and decide their collective values—and how this process might be influenced by historical contingency, cultural experience, and economic structures. In the more empirical realm, Jack is interested in exploring how the proliferation of policies, bureaucracy, and standard operating procedures can be understood as the attempt of associations to mediate their high-minded ideals with the realities of human association.
On campus, Jack is the manager of the Harvard Glee Club, the nation’s oldest collegiate choir, as well as an editor of the Harvard Review of Philosophy, a student-run philosophy journal which has published philosophers such as John Rawls and Slavoj Žižek.