Not Diverse Just Yet

Students at Harvard dot the globe; wherever you’re from, you can find a reminder of home tucked in between Harvard’s brick and mortar. And for having a world-renowned education, the school does a decent job in trying to have diversity, in culling people together who have just the right shades of skin to match the ideas they want to promote in their brochures.

Yet, for a school that emphasizes a heavy-handed commitment to diversity, it fails to actually cater to these groups in any meaningful way.

Surprise! Harvard Goes Corporate

When asked what she was going to do after a little more than a decade of being the president of the nation’s oldest and arguably most renowned university, former University President Drew G. Faust was hazy. Perhaps she’d spend a year at her Cape Cod home, reading. Maybe she’d dip her feet back into her love for history and the literature that lined her steps to the presidency in the first place. Overall, she was going to take deserved (and long overdue) time for herself.

After #bombharvard, We’re Still Here

“#bombharvard and end their pro-black agenda,” Arizona resident Nicholas Zuckerman allegedly wrote in the comments section of a Harvard Instagram post of the University's 2017 black Commencement, the first of its kind. He allegedly continued: “If the blacks only ceremony happens, then I encourage violence and death at it [...] I’m thinking two automatics with extendo clips.” According to the U.S. attorney’s office, he then spammed other accounts referencing the black Commencement repeatedly with the hashtag “#bombharvard.”

Thankfully, Zuckerman is now facing federal charges for his threats. However—though he was the most violently vocal—he wasn’t alone in his thoughts.

Why We Write

I wonder if words are ever enough.

After reading and writing religiously for The Crimson for the past two years, I’ve struggled sometimes to remember why I wear this habit like a second skin when it often feels ill-fitted. Why do we—I—continue writing? Why do we insist on preaching the Harvard experience knowing that once the words and passion trickle from our fingertips, they are held by only a handful of eyes, are given perhaps a fleeting consideration before quickly turning to the next hot take? Why write and invite change, only to be swiftly forgotten?

Breaking Harvard’s Liberal Echo Chamber

Formerly known as the Kremlin on the Charles, Harvard’s developed itself quite the reputation as a veritable winter wonderland in the past few years. Housing legions of politically correct “snowflakes” (a modern pejorative for liberals) who frequently stand up for their beliefs, eschew hate speech, and ask for inclusive social spaces, undergraduates and staff alike have re-dyed the Harvard name in leftist blue—so much so that drawing red from this name now is inseparable from also drawing blood from it.

This isn’t only a trend along the Charles—it’s a national phenomenon. Higher education has been shown to increase liberal leanings overall. Harvard is one of many schools that champions this liberal arts education that provide the soundscape for these thoughts to reverberate, enclosing left rhetoric in the bubble as the only intellectual air to breath. Yet, the accumulation of “snowflake” ideas gives way to an avalanche effect: The more prominent and heavily liberal ideals that are expressed on campus, the more likely for more conservative views to be swallowed, suffocated in the deluge, and rendered invisible under the snow.