In the spring of 2024, our junior year, just hours after student activists pitched their tents in Harvard Yard to form a pro-Palestine encampment, The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board, a body of opinion writers that meets thrice weekly to write editorials for Harvard’s student newspaper, convened to discuss the history unfolding just a block away.
As the board’s chairs, we contended that night with extraordinary circumstances. Our team was among the few organizations on campus that brought into dialogue students with starkly contrasting views of the Israel-Hamas war. Some of our members were staunchly pro-Israel Jews, while others were staunchly pro-Palestinian, including several with family members in the region. One of us, Jacob, was the president of Harvard Hillel, Harvard’s main center for Jewish life. A few members Zoomed into our meeting that night from the encampment’s tents and a handful joined from home, where they were observing Passover.
It was an extraordinary day. And yet it was not extraordinary for the editorial board. Our large, opinionated team was able to convene, discuss the issues civilly and argue that Harvard shouldn’t deploy the police against peaceful protesters — a perspective we collectively accepted as the board’s despite our individual disagreements. We had laid that groundwork months earlier, bolstering existing ground rules and instituting a suite of new ones to improve our ability to have cordial, professional discussions, even in the most unusual, stressful circumstances.
The success of these reforms upends the belief that lively, respectful discourse is no longer possible at places like Harvard.
The collegiality that characterized board discussions that spring marked a noticeable change from a couple of years earlier. When we joined The Crimson as freshmen, the editorial board was seen as left-wing and largely unwelcoming of even centrist views. While most board meetings did not touch on especially controversial issues and were cordial affairs, when they did, disagreement could become contentious.
A 2023 board meeting about the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in university admissions was emblematic of this problem. (We both attended, though we did not become the board’s chairs until the end of 2023, midway through our junior year.) A Pew Research Center poll conducted that year found that half of American adults disapproved of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in admissions — hardly a niche view. Yet despite robust national disagreement on the issue, the few contrarian comments voiced in that meeting elicited head shakes, eye rolls and several disdainful rebuttals from other board members. (The editorial board’s policy is to keep the contents of meetings private, so we offer only a general characterization of what took place.)
Too often, we saw views diverging from the board’s progressive slant meet with frowns, muttering and other subtle but unmistakably discouraging reactions. Less common but just as harmful were ad hominem attacks and overly emotional appeals to personal experience that frustrated constructive debate.
On the occasions that meetings went awry, we published editorials that were unpersuasive and ultimately discrediting. In one instance, we greeted news that Harvard would provide a one-time grant of $2,000 to all low-income students with criticism that the grants were “meager.” In another, after an uncomfortable meeting about the lukewarm reaction to a campus performance by a Black R&B artist, we said students were failing to apply a “bare minimum level of cultural appreciation.”
The Crimson had already paid a price for this conformist tendency when it came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2022 the board published a weak editorial supporting the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement against Israel. Without meaningfully grappling with opposing views or much discussion of Israel’s actual conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, the editorial failed a basic test: Could this persuade someone who doesn’t already agree with it?
The backlash was swift: The Crimson faced condemnation from a U.S. senator and several prominent Harvard faculty members, while our members contended with doxxing, online harassment and threats so severe that campus police stepped up security around our building. Concerned in part by past experience, a year and a half later the board avoided publishing any editorials about the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel for several weeks, even as Harvard became a focus in the story about the ripple effects of the war in America.
How could such an organization evolve to first debate and then write about Israel so reasonably?
To start, our predecessors put a great deal of thought into how to facilitate difficult discussions and led us through our first two meetings about Israel and Gaza after Oct. 7, which were challenging but resulted in two principled, powerful editorials.
Both leading up to and especially at the start of our tenure as the board’s chairs, several Jewish students, frustrated by what they saw as its anti-Israel leanings, joined the board. In meetings they took positions that had at times gone unvoiced, providing a personal perspective on a conflict that, thousands of miles away, could feel abstract.
Initially, we worried that an influx of board members with different views on Israel could make meetings even more contentious. But we built on our nascent progress, in large part because of policies we strengthened or introduced at the start of 2024: We would have zero tolerance for declaring dissenting views off-limits or reacting to them in ways that conveyed as much; we would make clear that arguments grounded in personal experience had an important place, but discourage rants or overly emotional comments that could chill speech; and we would intervene — readily, calmly and firmly — when these principles were violated.
We also made broader reforms to improve the quality of our meetings, banning laptops (long a source of distraction) and requiring more regular attendance, which led board members to know and trust one another better. As moderators, we fact-checked remarks more assiduously and discouraged aimless or redundant contributions.
None of these changes came easily.
The two of us faced a measure of internal criticism, but we consistently underscored the importance of principled, rational disagreement. Meeting by meeting, the board rallied behind this approach. Disagreeing civilly about big stories — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also D.E.I., free speech and admissions policies — became routine, and we published thoughtful editorials that helped earn back disillusioned readers’ respect. Refined by dissent, our editorials, regardless of their ideological tilt, offered stronger reasoning and more engagement with counterarguments. They passed the test our previous editorials on controversial issues had too often failed.
Increasingly, we’re told that it’s almost impossible for difficult conversations to happen on college campuses anymore. Three times a week, during two of the most divisive semesters in Harvard’s history, our team proved that analysis wrong.
The heart of the issue is our habits of discussion — how we tend to react when we find ourselves in the majority.
We’re dubious that merely admitting more centrists and conservatives to universities like Harvard will improve the state of dialogue on campus. And we’re appalled by President Trump’s assault on higher education, clearly undertaken, at least in part, under the guise of remedying the issues with campus discourse.
To us, the solution is deceptively simple. Universities should create environments where students with different views must talk to one another routinely and establish ground rules that ensure they do so without distractions or prejudgment.
Illiberalism on college campuses isn’t inevitable. At The Crimson, it took only a few months to radically improve.
Tommy Barone will study American history at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in the upcoming academic year. Jacob M. Miller is an economics Ph.D. student at Yale and a Furman scholar at the New York University School of Law. They were chairs of The Harvard Crimson’s editorial board from December 2023 to December 2024.
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