Dissent: Keep the Politics Out of Office Hours

Following new guidance from Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will now permit signage, political or otherwise, to be displayed in private spaces across campus. The new rules extend to dorm rooms and workspaces, but their most consequential application is to faculty offices, where political displays are now allowed.

The Editorial Board celebrates this as a move toward free speech. Yet, the Board fails to consider the chilling effect the change will have on campus discourse, at a time when students are already hesitant to speak their minds on controversial issues.

For that reason, I dissent.

Free speech is one of America’s greatest achievements, and I agree with the Board that it is vital on campus. But Harvard’s campus is not a public square — it is an academic institution with power imbalances between students and faculty, and the views faculty push undoubtedly shape the bounds of classroom discourse.

The updated guidelines relax previous University restrictions across FAS buildings, presumably allowing displays like the Black Lives Matter banner hung by professors in the Northwest Science Building until last August.

While faculty and staff should express views freely in their personal capacities, their campus offices are not personal spaces. Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, in a recent podcast, specifically cited faculty injecting their political views into the classroom as harmful to open discourse on campus. The use of academic offices to push political ideologies would risk making Harvard a place of indoctrination, not of intellectual exploration.

The amended rules do not place any limits on which political views may be displayed in university offices. Of course, this puts Harvard in the impossible position of deciding what political views and symbols are simply too offensive to be displayed on campus grounds. It’s easy to think of symbols and imagery that a reasonable student would take offense to in their professor’s office; yet, any specific restrictions on what speech goes too far would be arbitrary and endlessly contested.

Take a hypothetical example of a course on an armed conflict between two countries. If that instructor were to display one country’s flag in their office, it would place pressure on students attending their office hours to conform to their instructor’s belief system.

The more a course’s subject matter sparks controversy, the more likely political displays are to complicate student relationships with faculty. Last year, after a faculty committee described widespread self-censorship, a proposal to prohibit grading based on political beliefs passed by a wide margin. Yet this week, the FAS explicitly allowed the very kind of displays that pressure students to censor themselves.

This rule change comes at precisely the wrong moment. A 2024 survey of the College’s graduating class found that most seniors — particularly moderates and conservatives — do not feel comfortable expressing their views on controversial topics. Among those who felt uncomfortable sharing their beliefs, 35 percent cited fears of unfair grading. Sanctioning activism in faculty offices will only deepen self-censorship. Far from advancing academic freedom, this rule change undermines it.

More broadly, signage displayed by faculty and staff does not encourage the type of open discourse and rigorous inquiry Harvard seeks — it stifles it. Political signage is static and declarative. It cannot listen, qualify, or respond.

On a campus presumably filled with the brightest minds in the world, why are we resorting to bumper-sticker-level political discourse?

Tejas S. Billa ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Statistics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.