My roommate once asked me if we, as students of this most prestigious institution, did not have an innate duty to better the world. Our tiny double at the very end of a fifth floor walk up was often the sight of such late night tête-à-têtes (her being French and our beds being 12 inches apart, I thought this the appropriate phrase to use). In these intimate salons we spoke of art, politics, history, war, and family, but it was this most grandiose of topics that so eluded me. What of duty?

I consider myself fairly well-spoken. I was raised in an environment where the most larded answer was always the best one and obscure references to decades-old political sex scandals added color to any dull statement.

However, in this instance I found myself unable to put forth the eloquent pronouncement that would surely have guaranteed my ascension into the upper echelon of humanists and philosophers. I mumbled some pretentious nonsense about how “not all of us can be George Soros,” and then promptly went to sleep.

Duty, as an extremely wishy-washy term, seems to elicit a very narrow vision in popular imagination. Picture the strapping all-American youth enlisting in some 1950s adjacent foreign war or the good priest handing a bowl of steaming porridge to the ragged man sleeping outside the cathedral.

But what of duty to history, to wisdom, to one another? These callings seem unable to penetrate the collective conscience of the Harvard student body.

In an interview with the magazine, David J. Deming, Dean of Harvard College, stated that the biggest challenge the college will face in the coming years will be “the growing public skepticism of the value of higher education.”

In these troubled times, a Harvard education seems less like a precious opportunity to explore our deepest passions and learn from the diverse experiences of our peers, but a stepping stone towards the worlds of banking and AI labs. Within the graduating class of 2026, 51 percent reported they were entering the fields of finance, consulting, or technology.

A rabid strain of toxic individualism is in our midst. Instead of cherishing our places in one of the most selective institutions in the world, we compete to be further recognized in low-acceptance rate student organizations and societies. We constantly measure ourselves against our peers: how well we performed on exams, how many non-profits we founded, how many “punches” we received from final clubs. The storied “Harvard dropout” has become not a minor tragedy but an emblem of individual success, a middle finger to the obsolete institution.

But, as the Harvard graduates of the future, we will always possess a certain degree of cultural influence. Is it not our duty to wield that power responsibly? To lead the charge of social improvement and ensure the contentment of our posterity?

Ostensibly, Harvard feels it’s necessary for us to at least consider our answers. When first applying to the College, all potential Harvard students must answer the question: “How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future?”

It is hard to imagine that many 17 year olds would answer this question by citing their future Palantir careers. I expect that Harvard receives a plethora of essays about plans to cure cancer, to lead a country out of poverty, to construct the foundation upon which a new, kinder, world order might thrive. Five years later one is likely to find these students at McKinsey and Anthropic, having forgotten their passions for the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.

The blame for this misdirection cannot be placed entirely at the feet of the student body. Recruiters for finance and consulting firms arrive on campus in startling numbers during the fall semester of sophomore year, hoping to sway young talent into lucrative “get rich quick” internships.

Of course, there is nothing inherently malicious about the desire to make money; it would cross the line between idealism and quixoticism to suggest otherwise. However, with the cultural power that is bestowed upon us with a Harvard degree, it is our duty to use the money not only to serve our own interests or those of the self-benefitting corporation but to institute societal changes which might ripple out into a universally just future.

As it stands, the modern American cultural landscape places greater value on the accumulation of wealth, technical expertise, and self-marketing skills than it does on intellect, creativity, and empathy. The university is not immune to this, and neither are its students. The deemphasis on scholarship, art, and the humanities is the offspring of this original sin.

Part of the skepticism with higher education (returning to Deming’s Crimson interview) manifests in the subtle antagonism we have for the concentrations and educational paths which are not guaranteed money-makers. The raised eyebrows at an English concentrator, the “what are you going to do with that?” to a Social Studies degree, the “AI’s gonna steal your job” to an art student have become all too common markers of American mammonism.

The hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities have often, in national and familial conversation alike, been put head to head. I too am guilty of this, though I believe it to be the most egregious of sins. We are, as a university and as a country, stagnant without the hard sciences, lawless without the social sciences, and — what is often overlooked — emotionally bankrupt without the arts and humanities.

I do, of course, have stakes in this inquiry. I approach the Harvard experience as a filmmaker and therefore consider the question of duty to mean: what is the purpose of art? What can I do as an artist?

These are complex philosophical questions that have been pondered by thinkers much more experienced than I, for much longer than I have been alive. My answer will therefore never measure up to those of Aristotle and Zadie Smith. However, I choose to endow myself with enough ethos as to provide some minor insight into the role of the arts in education.

Where the study of history, philosophy, and mathematics allows eager students to gain insight into the inner workings of our world, the creation of art distills it into oeuvres that, hopefully, will allow others to comprehend experiences that they never had. It forever preserves this moment in time, allowing the students of the future to understand us, our culture.

As follows, an arts education becomes as essential to the university as math, science, and economics. For it is the duty of the university to facilitate in its students the skills necessary to create a new and better world, and empathy is the most valuable of said skills.

When I, as an idealistic and enormously pretentious 17 year old, was asked the question “how do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future?” I answered that I wanted to make academically informed films, that “art was a crucial ingredient in brokering social change.” No matter how else I have changed, I still believe this to be true.

We cannot change the world if we do not understand the ways in which it operates, if we do not sense the undercurrents of history, politics, and economics that push our society towards implosion. It is not only the politician and scientist’s duty to help us reach this understanding, but the artist’s, too.

The successful artist infects every nook and cranny of popular imagination with their work. They foster empathy and shape the cultural zeitgeist without much of the public ever realizing that they were there. It is this calling more than anything that so ignites me, and it is all of our duties to create a university culture in which passion might thrive.

So in an effort to answer the question, what of duty? I must make a few more pointed inquiries into the failings of the modern-day university and the failure of the student body: What of passion? What of collaboration? And, above all, what of empathy?

— Magazine writer Astrid S. H. Aggour can be reached at [email protected].