Harvard Forum Highlights Rural Student Voices, Expands Advocacy Efforts

The Harvard Undergraduate Rural League drew campus leaders and national advocates on Saturday for its first large-scale event, a forum focused on elevating rural student voices and representation at Harvard.

The day-long Harvard Rurality Forum featured opening remarks from Harvard College Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne, a keynote address, and panels spanning careers in medicine, education, and economic development. Organizers said the event aimed to highlight the diversity of rural experiences and expand pathways for advocacy.

The forum is the first major event for the organization, which was founded in 2024. But hosting a forum has been a long-term goal since the group first formed, according to HURL co-president Kevin M. Scanlan ’27.

“It is the culmination of not just six months of planning, but a year and a half of our efforts to build community and platform rural issues,” Scanlan said.

Dreama Gentry, a fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founder of the nonprofit Partners for Rural Impact, emphasized the national stakes of rural inclusion in a keynote address.

“We have to refine the American dream, we have to continue to create a nation where every person — every young person — has a chance to be successful,” Gentry said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to do that until rural America is engaged and not written off and not vilified.”

Gentry received HURL’s inaugural Rural Representative Award at the forum’s close.

Co-president Justin J. Black ’27 aid the event was designed to connect students across different rural backgrounds while bridging gaps between communities on campus.

“The Harvard Rurality Forum was really born out of this idea that we need to build bridges between different place-based identities on campus,” Black said.

Panelists spoke about the significance of accessibility to elite institutions like Harvard for rural students. Aimee R. Guidera, the former Virginia Secretary of Education and current resident fellow at the Institute of Politics, teared up as she recalled hearing that a student in southwest Virginia recently committed to Harvard with the hopes of becoming a surgeon.

Stories like that, she said, show rural students they “can dream as big as you want, and go to what is considered the world’s greatest university.”

In his opening remarks, Dunne spoke about the importance of following students’ lead on rural representation on campus.

“We have students able to say, ‘Here’s something we care about, here’s something we think is important, and we think Harvard should be part of this.’ And so that’s the moment I feel that we’re in now,” Dunne said.

Caleb R. Whitman ’29, who attended high school in Galax, a small town in southwest Virginia, described HURL as an “outlet to reach out and meet other rural students who had similar experiences.”

“There’s a whole new language to college of things like office hours,” Whitman said. “So having a group like HURL that is so open and has such great people is great to be able to learn the knowledge that we otherwise would be expected to know.”