Citizenship Needs a Home at Harvard

Henry W. Holmes, Class of 1903, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, declared in a 1955 address: “Citizens of the United States must learn the meaning and responsibilities of freedom, and educators must not be afraid to teach them.”

Over 70 years later, the University has made some effort to impress civic responsibility and education upon students at the College, such as through the continued growth of the Phillips Brooks House Association, the Institute of Politics, and a designated pre-orientation program for civic engagement.

Intellectually, however, students at the College lack the opportunity to explore these topics in a sufficiently integrated manner. Harvard’s closest attempt, the College’s Certificate for Civic Engagement, is a haphazard collection of courses and lacks a specific direction.

Harvard needs a center for civic thought to meaningfully prepare students for citizenship, further academic inquiry in service of the nation, and change campus speech culture for the better.

The idea of civic centers in higher education has gained popularity, championed by think tanks and writers. A 2026 report from the Radcliffe Institute even affirmed how valuable this could be for Harvard.

Public universities like the University of Florida, University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have led the charge in incentivizing civic thought on their campuses. Their centers offer courses ranging from American politics to classic books to challenging philosophical questions. Outside of coursework, these centers host public lectures, debates, and reading groups, fostering a culture of vigorous discourse on campus.

Even fellow private schools such as Johns Hopkins University and Yale University have begun exploring centers devoted to the study of democracy, citizenship, and governance.

Notably, these centers aren’t confined to a classical discipline. Professors aren’t merely researching for basic facts or general understanding. Rather, their academic offerings pursue a more distinct mission: cultivating civic values.

Civic centers tend to focus on “civic thought” or “civic discourse.” The former explore the American founding and classical liberalism, while the latter focus on viewpoint diversity.

Harvard could complete both functions well.

And to unify its ever-expanding list of institutional goals — viewpoint diversity, intellectual vitality, and public service — a civic center could bring the consolidation the University so desperately needs.

Currently, the University’s purpose can be drawn from three distinct functions it serves: preparing students for an occupation, generating research, and providing a quality liberal arts education. The first two functions most clearly serve the nation’s interest: they provide economic value and push American innovation forward. The third, however, is more mystical.

A quality liberal arts education should meaningfully prepare the Harvard graduate for equal participation in the great experiment that is self-governance.

This function isn’t guaranteed by requiring students to take General Education, Expository Writing, or Quantitative Reasoning-required classes. Instead, the liberal arts must be explicitly built into students’ interactions with their academics. A civic center can offer unique coursework on just that.

A civics center at Harvard could uniquely serve as a conduit between students, faculty, and our nation. While the University’s value to the nation and the world has tended to increase over its near-400-year history, recentering on a civic purpose could propel the institution further.

Harvard could adopt any model that seemed most relevant, as centers come in no one shape. They can be as autonomous as an academic department, semi-autonomous across departments, or off-campus but affiliated. These differences allow schools to either offer their own center coursework or simply distribute certificates as Harvard already does.

While these centers are often dismissed as conservative efforts to politicize higher education, Harvard could model a center on its own terms, using it to increase viewpoint diversity without sacrificing its standards.

A center for civic thought focused on American politics, political theory, and discourse could attract the conservative faculty the University seems to struggle to find. At the same time, the center could attract students with strong views and interests in public service, helping them incorporate civic values more fully into their academic lives. Both populations lack robust engagement on campus, and together, could form a distinct new culture at the University.

After all, veritas is the foremost civic virtue.

Ira Sharma ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is an Economics Concentrator in Mather House.