Sophia K. Moraczewski ’29 first heard the term “intellectual vitality” in a required pre-orientation module the summer before her freshman year, in a video featuring then-College Dean Rakesh Khurana that touted the College’s commitment to “open dialogue.”

She was hooked. Before she set foot on campus, she applied to the initiative’s Student Advisory Board.

But a year later, after sitting on the 16-member board, Moraczewski still struggles to define what intellectual vitality means.

“I think seeing this, I was really excited to come have what we would call intellectually vital conversations,” she said. “I think I liked the term.”

Six years after Khurana convened a small group of undergraduates and faculty to address what administrators viewed as a deficit of free idea exchange on campus, the Intellectual Vitality Initiative has become a fixture of College life — and the recipient of nearly $200,000 in grant funding to student-led programming over the past two years.

But the program’s most public booster is no longer in office. Khurana stepped down at the end of the last academic year, and his successor, College Dean David J. Deming, has taken a more hands-off posture.

He has met with the Student Advisory Board less frequently than Khurana, according to former student co-chair Ari F. Kohn ’26, and has begun piloting his own programming — including a faculty meal-swipe initiative for upperclassman Houses — that he has chosen not to brand under the Intellectual Vitality banner.

“It’s really about embodying the principles of intellectual vitality, rather than having a bunch of formal initiatives with the name Intellectual Vitality attached to them,” Deming said in an interview.

Both Deming and Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said the program had succeeded in fostering more constructive dialogue on campus, citing senior survey data tracking how comfortable students feel expressing their views in the classroom and to peers.

Between 2024 and 2025, the share of graduating seniors who said they felt free to express opinions about controversial topics on campus rose 12 points to 45 percent, according to senior survey data shared by Deming. Comfort sharing opposing views climbed 8 points in courses and 12 points in residential communities, reaching 43 and 47 percent, respectively.

“We’re very pleased to see that every year our campus is more and more like what our faculty and students have always wanted it to be,” Claybaugh wrote in a statement. “A place of constructive disagreement and open inquiry.”

Deming, though, said he did not consider the work done.

“It’s not something we’re ever going to finish,” he said. “You can’t do that overnight.”

‘A Particular Kind of Conversation’

The Initiative has awarded a total of $194,000 in grants to student-led programming since the funding program launched, including roughly $77,000 to 21 successful applicants this academic year, according to current student co-chair Luka Pavikjevikj ’27.

The grants — open to any Harvard affiliate — have funded panels, speaker events, and “peer-to-peer conversation groups,” according to co-chair Jonathan ‘Jack’ P. Flanigan ’27.

Recipients this year include the Harvard Undergraduates for Bipartisan Solutions, a new journal on Jewish life at Harvard, a dinner series in Quincy House called “Big Questions,” and a panel on the ethics of cryonics organized by a Quincy House tutor.

Flanigan said the board cares more about the form of the conversations it funds than their content.

“We want to elevate a particular kind of conversation,” Flanigan said. The funding program, he added, is “pretty agnostic about the actual content of the events.”

Pavikjevikj said the breadth of funded events is intentional.

“It’s also a display of the plurality, if you will, of the diversity of ways in which intellectual vitality could be done,” he said.

Not every applicant has received funding. Students for Freedom, an anti-Trump activist group, was denied a grant for a “Democracy Teach-In” earlier this semester.

Flanigan wrote that the event was denied funding because it did not meet the funding criteria outlined by the Initiative.

“The event’s framing would not have allowed sufficient room for dissent or contestability of the event’s premises,” Flanigan wrote. “Though we believe that an intellectually vital campus will include student activism and protest, it is not the role of the funding program as presently conceived to support such activities.”

Margaret K. Bowles ’28, who leads Harvard Undergraduates for Bipartisan Solutions, said her organization received around $800 from the Initiative this year — and used less than it had requested. Two IVI-funded events her group hosted explored the evolution of civil discourse and the media’s coverage of immigration.

“Our funding requests have not been to the capacity that I think Intellectual Vitality has the capacity to fund,” Bowles said.

The student board has restructured itself in the past year into four working groups — events, pedagogy, funding, and communications — and hosted at least 10 events this academic year, according to Gabrielle L. Demuren ’28, an events subcommittee member.

Only five of the 16 current board members are returning from last year, with freshmen now making up the largest single class on the board.

Kohn said the board has also overhauled how it picks new members, replacing one-on-one interviews with a discussion-based group exercise designed to test how applicants engage with disagreement.

‘Not Something We’re Ever Going To Finish’

The structural shift has come alongside Deming’s lighter touch. Khurana attended an Initiative panel last October but has not engaged since, Kohn said, and the Student Advisory Board has not met with Deming this semester.

But Kohn said the change does not signal that the College has deprioritized the program.

“It’s also a function of intellectual vitality wanting to be, first of all, something as seen as legitimate by students, and it’s not some figurehead of the University,” she said.

Deming said he has tried to let students drive the program, framing his role as one of support rather than direction.

“I would describe it as a mix of student-led and led by some of the programs we’re doing,” Deming said. “I wouldn’t say it’s only student-led.”

Instead of issuing programming under the Intellectual Vitality name, he added, he has tried to model the program’s values through other means, pointing to his monthly on-the-record open forums with students.

In a later statement, Deming wrote that he remains open to meeting with the student leaders of the Initiative.

“While it is true that I have not met with the SAB this semester, I would have met with them if they asked,” he wrote.

The College is also revising its required pre-orientation module on constructive dialogue, which is currently delivered through the Constructive Dialogue Institute — a national nonprofit that designs research-based programs to help students engage across ideological differences.

Deming said he is working with Harvard Kennedy School professor Julia Minson, whose research focuses on how people signal openness in conversations, to build a Harvard-specific version of the module that draws on faculty research. He said he hopes to roll it out in the fall.

The Initiative was originally structured around four phases, the last of which — described on the program’s website as an “assess” phase — was meant to evaluate whether the program had achieved its goals. Several student leaders said the Initiative has cleared that final stage, but Deming said he did not view the program as moving through discrete phases at all.

“I think about it more as an evolution,” he said.

He compared the work of changing campus culture to a slow accumulation rather than a discrete intervention.

“You want to do this every year until it eventually has an effect through osmosis,” he said. “It’s like, we want to build a culture of intellectual inquiry and constructive dialogue. And you can’t do that overnight.”

Kohn, who served as the program’s first student co-chair and recently handed off the role, said the Initiative has matured from “a series of conversations” into a recognizable institution — one she compared to a young company.

“It’s largely been an exercise in institutional startups, which are not a thing that happens very often,” Kohn said.

She said the perception of the program has shifted as well. When the Initiative went public in 2024, she said, some students saw it as a reactive measure following the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard.

“There was a perception that intellectual vitality was really just like, oh, it’s a band-aid to fix what happened after the encampments,” Kohn said. “That it wasn’t just a sound blip has assuaged people’s concerns that that’s all it was and was going to be.”

“Now that people recognize it, they’re not like, oh, it’s an alien invader,” she added. “They’re like, oh, it’s just what Harvard is.”

—Staff writer Theresa F. Bartelme can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at theresabartelme.15. Follow her on X @theresabartelme.