On March 6th, Stanford Law School’s Federalist Society invited Kyle Duncan to speak on “Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Chaos ensued. Duncan, a conservative judge appointed by Donald Trump, was met with heckles from students during his speech, an interruption that halted his address. Following Duncan’s request for an administrator to help de-escalate the situation, SLS Associate Dean of DEI Jean Steinbach took the stage. Instead of briefly calming the crowd, she proceeded to give a 9-minute prepared speech. In this speech, she emphasized that the event made her deeply “uncomfortable,” and repeatedly asked, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” suggesting that the divisive response to Kyle Duncan’s presence was justified, and the event should have never occurred at all.
Although student discourse is a necessary part of campus culture, the nature of the Stanford Law students’ protests and the response of Steinbach reflects a worrying trend across college campuses: the belief that universities should protect students from ideas that make them uncomfortable.
Harvard is not immune to this phenomenon. In fact, many Harvard professors have founded and joined the Academic Freedom Alliance, an organization founded in 2021, to protect freedom of expression and research among university faculty members. One founding member, Elisabeth Bartholet, a Harvard professor of law, referred me to an article she wrote on April 1st in The Hill about the protest.
In her piece, Bartholet contrasted the Stanford incident to the “way many leading universities in the past prided themselves on exposing students to disturbing ideas.” In Bartholet’s time at Radcliffe College in the 1960s, both George Wallace, a fanatical segregationist, and Fidel Castro, a Cuban dictator, spoke to crowds of Harvard students. It is difficult to imagine having these speakers come to college campuses today; if Judge Kyle Duncan incited aggressive heckling, visits from figures like Wallace and Castro would have sparked something much worse.
Although these speakers likely held views reprehensible to the student population—some of which may have even been harmful to community members—confrontation with these beliefs and productive discourse are key to both a proper university education, as well as any hope for social progress.
In an interview with The Independent, Edward Hall, professor of philosophy at Harvard and founding member of the AFA, pointed out that inviting a speaker to campus is not an “endorsement of their views.” Rather, it recognizes that engaging with their ideas “serves the intellectual aims of the course,” enabling growth within the community. Firm distinctions from administrators or professors that welcoming guest speakers does not insinuate a concession to their views, but rather an acknowledgement of the value of engaging with their argument, could help encourage free discourse on campus.
These conversations are key, according to Hall, because students should have to grapple with “threatening ideas.” He argues that graduating without having been made uncomfortable in an academic setting would be a failure on Harvard’s part. After all, the mission statement of Harvard’s liberal arts education is to expose students to new ideas and to seek out truths—a process which begins with challenging the reasoning behind one’s own beliefs.
Placing certain ideas on a pedestal, as essentially unarguable and universal laws, blocks this type of academic inquiry. It creates an ignorance, according to Hall, in which there are “certain possibilities you cannot really bring into focus,” of which students are not even aware, due to social pressures or internal biases. To combat this ignorance, it is important to “bracket emotional response” in academic discussions.
At Harvard, this sequestering of ideas often arises in the political realm. Professor Ryan Enos, professor of government at Harvard and member of the AFA, cites part of the lack of diverse political conversation on campus to the scarcity of conservative faculty. In 2021, The Crimson reported that only 3% of the professors who responded to the Faculty Survey identified as conservative. According to Enos, a self-identified political liberal, “Where there is so little diversity of opinion and diversity of politics, it becomes easy to lose sight of the fact that a more general diversity exists.” Under the tutelage of a bubble of liberal professors, the very possibility of the validity of conservative ideas is precluded. This blind acceptance is a form of intellectual arrogance— treating certain political ideologies as dogma and losing sight of their real meaning.
Hall pointed to Carole Hooven as an example of the dangers of treating intellectual ideas as intransigent: those who dare to oppose certain academic ideas are attacked on moral and personal, rather than intellectual, grounds. Hooven, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, stated that biological sex is real, and was, subsequently, “unjustly” vilified as transphobic by her colleagues and students. Her course was later discontinued. According to Hall, we should strive to be a “community where criticizing each other’s ideas is not only welcomed but actively encouraged, but attacking each other’s characters is unacceptable.” Hall notes that there is a “sense among faculty of caution even at Harvard,” as ideological orthodoxy—dogmatic, uncontested views—seeps into campus culture.
Creating a space that truly fosters diversity of thought is inherently difficult. People have a tendency to defend their own beliefs and receiving contrarian views on sensitive topics can be unpleasant. However, Harvard needs to make it clear that students are expected to grapple with ideas which are both academically and emotionally challenging, rather than combat them.
In an era of Twitter echo chambers and polarized political discussion, the role of universities to facilitate unfettered research and discussion is more important than ever. Protecting students from uncomfortable ideas and creating a culture which seeks robust intellectual inquiry are not compatible, and it is Harvard’s job to protect the latter.
Kate Kadyan ’26 (katekadyan@college.harvard.edu) finds Kyle Duncan’s politics despicable but doesn’t think screaming at him will change his views.