To an outsider, Harvard might seem like the kind of place where student activism blooms. Just this summer, Harvard students congregated both in Harvard Yard and Washington D.C. to dispute the Supreme Court’s rejection of Affirmative Action. In January, more than 100 students walked out of John Comarroff’s classroom due to allegations of sexual assault. Despite these grand demonstrations of protests tied to the Harvard name, however, I find it difficult to affirm that our student body is representative of a culture of activism—the vast majority of students either do not care or are in a position where they cannot demonstrate their interest in involvement.
Sophomore Kawsar Yasin ’26, who has been involved in multiple protests on campus, especially those involving the rights of the Uyghur population in China, articulates the general indifference of Harvard students. “Campus culture in terms of activism and organizing tends to be the same pockets of people. Organizing protests and showing up consistently requires you to deeply care about these topics, and I think the broader Harvard community is somewhat apathetic to a lot of them,” she says. “Unless these issues particularly affect them, or they are easy to hop into, most people just do not get involved.”
Other students cite Harvard’s fast-paced environment as the main factor for their lack of participation. “It feels like there is always something going on, and it is hard to keep track of [protests],” said Aidan Kohn Murphy ’26, the Founder of Gen Z for Change.“So even though students might want to help, they might not even know [the protests] are happening in the first place.” While Harvard students do typically fill their schedules with countless activities and time-demanding enterprises, sometimes these outlets serve as nothing more than a distraction from the real world.
Furthermore, the concept of protesting is in itself stigmatized; activists look to make people uncomfortable in their passiveness towards contemporary issues. Many Harvard students are not willing to take the risk of being associated with a student movement. “I believe the pre-professional culture at Harvard stops some students from getting involved for fear of possibly affecting their career prospects,” confirms Dalal Hassane ’26, a student activist who has organized many protests on campus, including one last year after the murder of Jina Mahsa Amini in Iran.
Almost all protests on campus are led by the same small group of socially-engaged students. For instance, many of the students who helped organize the protests for the Palestine Solidarity Committee were also actively involved in the Comaroff walk out, as well as the demonstrations against laws banning Critical Race Theory. The result (regardless of the personal level of political interest) exceedingly limits the impact that these protests can have; meaningful change is reliant on the diverse perspectives and efforts that an entire community can bring. A campus that is reliant on a select few passionate students to fight against injustice is doomed to perpetuate the systems that its activists hoped to eliminate.
Political apathy represents a position of privilege—students can afford to not care about these problems if their lives will remain unchanged. But not all students are unaffected. Yet still, those who hail from war-torn countries or backgrounds of political turbulence might also not feel inclined to participate in on campus protests because of fear of retribution. “For me, organizing does not have the same stakes as for some of my peers,” said Kashish Bastola ’26, who in spring organized a vigil for the Nepali workers that died while constructing the World Cup Stadiums in Qatar. “Thankfully, I know that I can still go back to my motherland safely. But many of my friends can’t say the same. Because of their stance against their government’s practices, they now can’t return to their countries out of fear of persecution.”
So why do politically active students embrace protests? For many of them—the answer lies in the perceived impact of their voices. “If I don’t [protest]], I don’t know who will,” added Bastola. “I take on these issues because, as a Harvard student, I have a platform that is one-hundred times more likely to be heard. For many students these issues can seem distant, but these protests help to show them how close they actually are.”
This passion for activism has even shaped the way these leaders have interacted with the opportunities at Harvard. “Organizing has become central to my experience at Harvard. It’s how I met most of my friends today, and it has influenced small things, like the classes I have taken or the conferences I have attended, to bigger things like what I want to see for my future after college,” said Hassane.
These circles of impacted students are relatively small, calling for the need to bring multiple identities and communities together to make an impact. This practice of combining various identities under a collective narrative is known as intersectionality, which leads to protests like the one against John Comaroff which brought in individuals from myriad backgrounds on the grounds of feminism. However, as Hassane pointed out, “Many students are already familiar [with] the ideas surrounding feminism, but not so many can say the same about issues like the Palestine Occupation.” As a result, more niche, culture-specific protests typically garner less support, and thus struggle to achieve the goals that other collectives obtain with a more widespread blessing .
Although more and more students are putting their efforts into generating change in our community—carrying the burden of years of injustice on their backs— the story of a culture of social protest is still one that the broader student body is not ready to write.
Santiago Salazar ’26 (santiagosalazar@college.harvard.edu) writes Forum for the Independent.