The Upside of Being Conservative at Harvard

I had an unusual Harvard experience.

Shortly after matriculating back in 2014, I was recruited to continue dancing as a professional ballerina, and so I took an extended leave of absence to pursue the art form I loved. Nearly a decade later, I returned to campus in 2023 as a married 28-year-old with a career on stage behind me. While my unconventional path initially placed me among the relatively small number of students who step away from Harvard, my involvement with the Harvard Salient, the College’s sole conservative student publication, placed me among an even smaller and more distinct minority.

In one sense, I spent my years at Harvard the same way many of you did, trying to meet new people and figure out what to do next with my life. The difference was that I did so among peers who often neither welcomed nor tolerated my conservative beliefs.

Which is why I understand, better than most, both the appeal and the limits of Harvard’s most demanding new directive — viewpoint diversity.

For those of us who hope that our Harvard diplomas mean something more than a professional credential, we should all be heartened by the calls for less ideological orthodoxy on campus.

The Salient’s demands for viewpoint diversity are not abstract — they are born of necessity. For years, the Salient has served as a home base for students to learn, digest, and apply conservative thought on a campus where such opportunities are scarce.

Harvard’s own search for viewpoint diversity reflects the same underlying reality — in 2023, the year I returned to campus, roughly two percent of faculty identified as conservative. Less than one percent identified as “very conservative.”

Yet even as Harvard recently grew self-conscious of its ideological monoculture, the Salient was placed on probation at the end of 2024 for door-to-door distribution and copies were torn apart by students apparently outraged by the ideas contained within.

As a result, I moved through campus acutely aware that most people around me disagreed with my most foundational beliefs. My experience as a campus conservative was not only politically clarifying, but a near-constant interrogation of my worldview.

When you presume the person next to you is also a liberal because you’re a liberal, the epistemic humility required for the student experience — the ability to consider that you may be wrong — is basically lost. I never once had the luxury of presuming that the student beside me shared my beliefs; for that reason, I emerge from Harvard today more conservative than when I entered.

It’s an irony of epic proportions: a campus that chills free speech and relegates conservative thought to ridicule has unintentionally created conservative students with an elite skillset for dealing with the real world, far beyond our more insulated liberal peers.

In my final weeks on campus, I spent hours speaking with fellow students, professors, and administrators who had devoted energy towards Harvard’s rehabilitation. The most hopeful thing I heard amounted to this: Harvard is a bureaucratic morass, but we promise change is happening. Just very, very slowly.

Even if that is the case, I’m not convinced Harvard understands what it is trying to restore. I’ve noticed that to the extent that viewpoint diversity does exist on campus today, it tends to fall flat. Intellectual pluralism does not, by itself, make for a sufficient liberal arts education. It is a means to a great education, but not a fulfilled end.

In fact, throwing the doors open to intellectual pluralism, untethered from any epistemic humility, can also lead to stunted learning. Exposure to competing viewpoints means very little if students approach those ideas merely searching for affirmation of what they already believe. In my experience, students desperate for a solution to all the suffering in the world tend to clutch onto the most fashionable answers, treating dissent not as an opportunity for clarity, but as a threat to their own moral certainty.

There is no point in expending tremendous energy to assemble more diverse viewpoints on campus only for Harvard students — perhaps out of fear, or out of complacency — to engage with the views with which they already agree.

The point of our education must be the aggressive pursuit of truth: not ideological performance, not relative truth, not “lived experience,” but the actual truth. At the very least, we ought to pursue truth seriously enough to recognize how difficult it is to fully possess.

“Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae”— the original Veritas upon which Harvard was founded — embodies the sense of epistemic humility that Harvard’s founders intended for our school. The motto stood as a promise that students would spend their Harvard experience searching for truth, while also reminding students that they may never grasp it — at least not through reason alone.

Don’t get me wrong: my years at Harvard were shaped by the fight to restore viewpoint diversity to campus. I will always be tremendously grateful for my time here and for the Salient’s achievements throughout.

But the value of viewpoint diversity will only be realized when we students are capable of examining our most profound beliefs. Humility — not certainty — is what ought to define the Harvard student experience. For conservatives, the task is far easier as they navigate a campus steeped in liberalism. For liberals, an entirely new approach to their education is required.

Should Harvard succeed in rebuilding a campus where students are free to sort through all competing ideas, I hope we, as students and graduates, will also recover the courage to act out what our motto demands.

Sarah L. Steele ’18-’26 is an editorial producer for The Ben Shapiro Show at The Daily Wire. She served as the president of the Harvard Salient during the 2024-2025 school year.