harvard english thesis

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Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "English"

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"All May Na Man Have in Talle": The Parabiblical Imaginary in Medieval English Literature 

Cognitive boundaries: perception and ethics in nineteenth-century britain , colony writing: creative community in the age of revolt , cosmopolitan romance: the adventure of archaeology, the politics of genre, and the origins of the future in walter scott's crusader novels , the entangled cities: earthly communities and the heavenly jerusalem in late medieval england , the fate of epic in twentieth-century american poetry , getting lost: forms of animation in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century british novel , hap: uncertainty and the english novel , the imaginary encyclopedia: the novel and the reference work in the age of reason , lyric as comedy , milton and music , the miniature and victorian literature , “my life is only one life”: turning to other people in american lyric poetry after new criticism , narrative and its non-events: counterfactual plotting in the victorian novel , poetry, desire, and devotional performance from shakespeare to milton, 1609-1667 , practical georgics: managing the land in medieval britain , the practice of form: arts of life in victorian literature , the premodern literary: matter and form in english poetry 1400-1547 , protestant institutionalism: religion, literature, and society after the state church , representations of counsel in selected works of sir philip sidney .

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The senior thesis is typically the most challenging writing project undertaken by undergraduate students. The writing guides below aim to introduce students both to the specific methods and conventions of writing original research in their area of concentration and to effective writing process.

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The Thesis Process

The thesis is an opportunity to work independently on a research project of your own design and contribute to the scholarly literature in your field. You emerge from the thesis process with a solid understanding of how original research is executed and how to best communicate research results. Many students have gone on to publish their research in academic or professional journals.

To ensure affordability, the per-credit tuition rate for the 8-credit thesis is the same as our regular course tuition. There are no additional fees (regular per-credit graduate tuition x 8 credits).

Below are the steps that you need to follow to fulfill the thesis requirement. Please know that through each step, you will receive guidance and mentorship.

1. Determine Your Thesis Topic and Tentative Question

When you have completed between 24 and 32 credits, you work with your assigned research advisor to narrow down your academic interests to a relevant and manageable thesis topic. Log in to MyDCE , then ALB/ALM Community to schedule an appointment with your assigned research advisor via the Degree Candidate Portal.

Thesis Topic Selection

We’ve put together this guide  to help frame your thinking about thesis topic selection.

Every effort is made to support your research interests that are grounded in your ALM course work, but faculty guidance is not available for all possible projects. Therefore, revision or a change of thesis topic may be necessary.

• The point about topic selection is particularly pertinent to scientific research that is dependent upon laboratory space, project funding, and access to private databases. It is also critical for our candidates in ALM, liberal arts fields (English, government, history, international relations, psychology, etc.) who are required to have Harvard faculty direct their thesis projects. Review Harvard’s course catalog online ( my.harvard.edu ) to be sure that there are faculty teaching courses related to your thesis topic. If not, you’ll need to choose an alternative topic.
• Your topic choice must be a new area of research for you. Thesis work represents thoughtful engagement in new academic scholarship. You cannot re-purpose prior research. If you want to draw or expand upon your own previous scholarship for a small portion of your thesis, you need to obtain the explicit permission of your research advisor and cite the work in both the proposal and thesis. Violations of this policy will be referred to the Administrative Board.

2. Prepare Prework for the Crafting the Thesis Proposal (CTP) Course or Tutorial

The next step in the process is to prepare and submit Prework in order to gain registration approval for the Crafting the Thesis Proposal (CTP) tutorial or course. The Prework process ensures that you have done enough prior reading and thinking about your thesis topic to benefit from the CTP.

The CTP provides an essential onramp to the thesis, mapping critical issues of research design, such as scope, relevance to the field, prior scholarly debate, methodology, and perhaps, metrics for evaluating impact as well as bench-marking. The CTP identifies and works through potential hurdles to successful thesis completion, allowing the thesis project to get off to a good start.

In addition to preparing, submitting, and having your Prework approved, to be eligible for the CTP, you need to be in good standing, have completed a minimum of 32 degree-applicable credits, including the statistics/research methods requirement (if pertinent to your field). You also need to have completed Engaging in Scholarly Conversation (if pertinent to your field). If you were admitted after 9/1/2023 Engaging in Scholarly Conversation (A and B) is required, if admitted before 9/1/2023 this series is encouraged.

Advising Note for Biology, Biotechnology, and Bioengineering and Nanotechnology Candidates : Thesis projects in these fields are designed to support ongoing scientific research happening in Harvard University, other academic institutions, or life science industry labs and usually these are done under the direction of a principal investigator (PI). Hence, you need to have a thesis director approved by your research advisor  prior  to submitting CTP prework. Your CTP prework is then framed by the lab’s research. Schedule an appointment with your research advisor a few months in advance of the CTP prework deadlines in order to discuss potential research projects and thesis director assignment.

CTP Prework is sent to our central email box:  [email protected]  between the following firm deadlines:

• April 1 and June 1 for fall CTP
• September 1 and November 1 for spring CTP.  
• August 1 and October 1 for the three-week January session (ALM sustainability candidates only)
• International students who need a student visa to attend Harvard Summer School should submit their prework on January 1, so they can register for the CTP on March 1 and submit timely I-20 paperwork. See international students guidelines for more information.

Your research advisor will provide feedback on your prework submission to gain CTP registration approval.  If your prework is not approved after 3 submissions, your research advisor cannot approve your CTP registration.  If not approved, you’ll need to take additional time for further revisions, and submit new prework during the next CTP prework submission time period for the following term (if your five-year degree completion deadline allows).

3. Register and Successfully Complete the Crafting the Thesis Proposal Tutorial or Course

Once CTP prework is approved, you register for the Crafting the Thesis Proposal (CTP) course or tutorial as you would any other course. The goal of the CTP is to produce a complete, well-written draft of a proposal containing all of the sections required by your research advisor. Creating an academically strong thesis proposal sets the foundation for a high-quality thesis and helps garner the attention of a well-respected thesis director. The proposal is normally between 15 to 25 pages in length.

The CTP  tutorial  is not a course in the traditional sense. You work independently on your proposal with your research advisor by submitting multiple proposal drafts and scheduling individual appointments. You need to make self-directed progress on the proposal without special prompting from the research advisor. You receive a final grade of SAT or UNSAT (failing grade).

The CTP for sustainability is a three-week course in the traditional sense and you receive a letter grade, and it must be B- or higher to receive degree credit for the course.

You are expected to incorporate all of your research advisor’s feedback and be fully committed to producing an academically strong proposal leading to a thesis worthy of a Harvard degree. If you are unable to take advice from your research advisor, follow directions, or produce an acceptable proposal, you will not pass the CTP.

Successful CTP completion also includes a check on the proper use of sources according to our academic integrity guidelines. Violations of our academic integrity policy will be referred to the Administrative Board.

Maximum of two attempts . If you don’t pass that CTP, you’ll have — if your five-year, degree-completion date allows — just one more attempt to complete the CTP before being required to withdraw from the program. If you fail the CTP just once and have no more time to complete the degree, your candidacy will automatically expire. Please note that a WD grade counts as an attempt.

If by not passing the CTP you fall into poor academic standing, you will need to take additional degree-applicable courses to return to good standing before enrolling in the CTP for your second and final time, only if your five-year, degree-completion date allows. If you have no more time on your five-year clock, you will be required to withdraw.

Human Subjects

If your thesis, regardless of field, will involve the use of human subjects (e.g., interviews, surveys, observations), you will need to have your research vetted by the  Committee on the Use of Human Subjects  (CUHS) of Harvard University. Please review the IRB LIFECYCLE GUIDE located on the CUHS website. Your research advisor will help you prepare a draft copy of the project protocol form that you will need to send to CUHS. The vetting process needs to be started during the CTP tutorial, before a thesis director has been assigned.

4. Thesis Director Assignment and Thesis Registration

We expect you to be registered in thesis soon after CTP completion or within 3 months — no later. You cannot delay. It is critical that once a research project has been approved through the CTP process, the project must commence in a timely fashion to ensure the academic integrity of the thesis process.

Once you (1) successfully complete the CTP and (2) have your proposal officially approved by your research advisor (RA), you move to the thesis director assignment phase. Successful completion of the CTP is not the same as having an officially approved proposal. These are two distinct steps.

If you are a life science student (e.g., biology), your thesis director was identified prior to the CTP, and now you need the thesis director to approve the proposal.

The research advisor places you with a thesis director. Do not approach faculty to ask about directing your thesis.  You may suggest names of any potential thesis directors to your research advisor, who will contact them, if they are eligible/available to direct your thesis, after you have an approved thesis proposal.

When a thesis director has been identified or the thesis proposal has been fully vetted by the preassigned life science thesis director, you will receive a letter of authorization from the Assistant Dean of Academic Programs officially approving your thesis work and providing you with instructions on how to register for the eight-credit Master’s Thesis. The letter will also have a tentative graduation date as well as four mandatory thesis submission dates (see Thesis Timetable below).

Continuous Registration Tip: If you want to maintain continued registration from CTP to thesis, you should meet with your RA prior to prework to settle on a workable topic, submit well-documented prework, work diligently throughout the CTP to produce a high-quality proposal that is ready to be matched with a thesis director as soon as the CTP is complete.

Good academic standing. You must be good academic standing to register for the thesis. If not, you’ll need to complete additional courses to bring your GPA up to the 3.0 minimum prior to registration.

Thesis Timetable

The thesis is a 9 to 12 month project that begins after the Crafting the Thesis Proposal (CTP); when your research advisor has approved your proposal and identified a Thesis Director.

The date for the appointment of your Thesis Director determines the graduation cycle that will be automatically assigned to you:

Once registered in the thesis, we will do a 3-month check-in with you and your thesis director to ensure progress is being made. If your thesis director reports little to no progress, the Dean of Academic Programs reserves the right to issue a thesis not complete (TNC) grade (see Thesis Grading below).

As you can see above, you do not submit your thesis all at once at the end, but in four phases: (1) complete draft to TA, (2) final draft to RA for format review and academic integrity check, (3) format approved draft submitted to TA for grading, and (4) upload your 100% complete graded thesis to ETDs.

Due dates for all phases for your assigned graduation cycle cannot be missed.  You must submit materials by the date indicated by 5 PM EST (even if the date falls on a weekend). If you are late, you will not be able to graduate during your assigned cycle.

If you need additional time to complete your thesis after the date it is due to the Thesis Director (phase 1), you need to formally request an extension (which needs to be approved by your Director) by emailing that petition to:  [email protected] .  The maximum allotted time to write your thesis, including any granted extensions of time is 12 months.

Timing Tip: If you want to graduate in May, you should complete the CTP in the fall term two years prior or, if a sustainability student, in the January session one year prior. For example, to graduate in May 2025:

• Complete the CTP in fall 2023 (or in January 2024, if a sustainability student)
• Be assigned a thesis director (TD) in March/April 2024
• Begin the 9-12 month thesis project with TD
• Submit a complete draft of your thesis to your TD by February 1, 2025
• Follow through with all other submission deadlines (April 1, April 15 and May 1 — see table above)
• Graduate in May 2025

5. Conduct Thesis Research

When registered in the thesis, you work diligently and independently, following the advice of your thesis director, in a consistent, regular manner equivalent to full-time academic work to complete the research by your required timeline.

You are required to produce at least 50 pages of text (not including front matter and appendices). Chapter topics (e.g., introduction, background, methods, findings, conclusion) vary by field.

6. Format Review — Required of all Harvard Graduate Students and Part of Your Graduation Requirements

All ALM thesis projects must written in Microsoft Word and follow a specific Harvard University format. A properly formatted thesis is an explicit degree requirement; you cannot graduate without it.

Your research advisor will complete the format review prior to submitting your thesis to your director for final grading according to the Thesis Timetable (see above).

You must use our Microsoft Word ALM Thesis Template or Microsoft ALM Thesis Template Creative Writing (just for creative writing degree candidates). It has all the mandatory thesis formatting built in. Besides saving you a considerable amount of time as you write your thesis, the preprogrammed form ensures that your submitted thesis meets the mandatory style guidelines for margins, font, title page, table of contents, and chapter headings. If you use the template, format review should go smoothly, if not, a delayed graduation is highly likely.

Format review also includes a check on the proper use of sources according to our academic integrity guidelines. Violations of our academic integrity policy will be referred directly to the Administrative Board.

7. Mandatory Thesis Archiving — Required of all Harvard Graduate Students and Part of Your Graduation Requirements

Once your thesis is finalized, meaning that the required grade has been earned and all edits have been completed, you must upload your thesis to Harvard University’s electronic thesis and dissertation submission system (ETDs). Uploading your thesis ETDs is an explicit degree requirement; you cannot graduate without completing this step.

The thesis project will be sent to several downstream systems:

• Your work will be preserved using Harvard’s digital repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard).
• Metadata about your work will be sent to HOLLIS (the Harvard Library catalog).
• Your work will be preserved in Harvard Library’s DRS2 (digital preservation repository).

By submitting work through ETDs @ Harvard you will be signing the Harvard Author Agreement. This license does not constrain your rights to publish your work subsequently. You retain all intellectual property rights.

For more information on Harvard’s open access initiatives, we recommend you view the Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), Peter Suber’s brief introduction .

Thesis Grading

You need to earn a grade of B- or higher in the thesis. All standard course letter grades are available to your thesis director. If you fail to complete substantial work on the thesis, you will earn a grade of TNC (thesis not complete). If you have already earned two withdrawal grades, the TNC grade will count as a zero in your cumulative GPA.

If you earn a grade below B-, you will need to petition the Administrative Board for permission to attempt the thesis for a second and final time. The petition process is only available if you are in good academic standing and your five-year, degree-completion deadline allows for more time. Your candidacy will automatically expire if you do not successfully complete the thesis by your required deadline.

If approved for a second attempt, you may be required to develop a new proposal on a different topic by re-enrolling in the CTP and being assigned a different thesis director. Tuition for the second attempt is calculated at the current year’s rate.

If by not passing the thesis you fall into poor academic standing, you’ll need to take additional degree-applicable courses to return to good standing before re-engaging with the thesis process for the second and final time. This is only an option if your five-year, degree-completion deadline allows for more time.

The Board only reviews cases in which extenuating circumstances prevented the successful completion of the thesis.

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The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at Harvard University is dedicated to bringing rigorous academics and innovative teaching capabilities to those seeking to improve their lives through education. We make Harvard education accessible to lifelong learners from high school to retirement.

• Dissertation

Requirements, deadlines, and other information on preparing and submitting a dissertation.

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PhD candidates must successfully complete and submit a dissertation to qualify for degree conferral. It is perhaps the most important and far-reaching undertaking in the entire doctoral program, having an impact that extends well beyond graduate studies. 

Requirements and Deadlines 

Each graduate program maintains specific requirements for the content and evaluation of the dissertation. Be sure to review your program’s departmental requirements prior to beginning the process. You should also review Harvard Griffin GSAS’s dissertation policies for important information about formatting, submission, and publishing and distribution options, including embargoes.  

Degrees are awarded in November, March, and May. Dissertation submission deadlines are noted in the Degree Calendar section of Policies . 

Help with the Dissertation 

Library research .

It’s never too early to start planning for your dissertation. The Harvard Library can help! The Library maintains a guide for graduate students engaged in scholarly writing titled the Writing Oasis . They also offer access to Overleaf , which is an online LaTeX and Rich Text collaborative writing and publishing tool that makes the process of academic writing, editing, and publishing quicker and easier. Overleaf has a section on Writing Your Dissertation that you may find useful.  

Writing 

Students can find support with planning and preparing to write the dissertation from their academic advisors and programs. The Fellowships & Writing Center also offers workshops on various aspects of dissertation writing, holds brainstorming office hours during which students may discuss their dissertations, and provides written feedback on dissertation chapters.  

Dissertation Completion Fellowships 

Harvard Griffin GSAS provides a dissertation completion fellowship (DCF) for one academic year to eligible PhD students in the humanities and social sciences who anticipate completing their dissertations within the year. Find out more in Policies .

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See here for a full list of dissertations since 1904 .

Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.

© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College

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To be made up of:

• Year of submission (in round brackets).
• Title of thesis (in italics).
• Degree statement.
• Degree-awarding body.
• Available at: URL.
• (Accessed: date).

In-text citation: 

(Smith, 2019)

Reference List:  

Smith, E. R. C. (2019). Conduits of invasive species into the UK: the angling route? Ph. D. Thesis. University College London. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10072700 (Accessed: 20 May 2021).

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| 5.23.2024

Shruthi Kumar ’24, Senior English Address: “The Power of Not Knowing”

Amid divisions and uncertainties, finding “space for empathy, solidarity, and a willingness to listen”.

Return to main article:

As prepared for delivery. For Kumar’s additional remarks, please read the accompanying article .

The Power of Not Knowing

Today, we are celebrated for what we know. In fact, for most of our lives, we’ve learned to feel a sense of accomplishment from the awards, accolades, and honors that lined our childhood homes. How much we knew and how we leveraged it got us far. It got us here. But today, I want to convince you of something counterintuitive that I’ve learned from the Class of 2024: the power of not knowing.

I grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska alongside cattle ranches and cornfields. As the eldest daughter of South Asian immigrants, I was the first in my family to go to college here in the US. There was a lot I didn’t know. When it came time, I asked my parents how to apply to colleges. They too said, “I don’t know.”

The words “I don’t know” used to make me feel powerless. Like there was no answer, and therefore, no way. As if I was admitting defeat.

From Nebraska to Harvard, I found myself redefining this feeling of not knowing. I discovered a newfound power in how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know a field called the “History of Science” even existed. I now find myself a graduate of the Department. In my freshman year of college, for the first time in my life, I was taught by a professor of color. A Historian of Science who made clear to me that history is just as much about the stories we don’t know as the stories we do.

In the History of Science, we often look for what is missing. What documents are not in the archives and whose voices are not captured in history? I’ve learned silence is rarely empty, often loud. What we don’t know can sometimes tell the most powerful story.

I learned this not only in the classroom, but also from the Class of 2024. In reflecting on our collective journey at Harvard, I’ve learned it's often the moments of uncertainty from which something greater than we could have ever imagined grows. Our class has experienced more than our fair share of the unknown.

Our first year, during COVID, we didn’t have Annenberg to meet 100 people in an hour and walk out remembering 5 names. We didn’t know what starting Harvard in the middle of a global pandemic would be like. So what did we do?Jefe’s became the new Annenberg, and we learned, in the midst of uncertainty, to connect differently, building quality over quantity in our friendships. In our sophomore year, Roe v. Wade was overturned and there was and still is, in many parts of the country, an omnipresent uncertainty in accessing reproductive healthcare. In our junior year, Harvard faced the Supreme Court and the decision to reverse affirmative action. Whether we realize it or not, we have been swimming in uncharted waters.

Which brings me to our senior year, a year on campus that has been marked by enormous uncertainty. In the fall, my name and identity alongside other black and brown students at Harvard was publically targeted. For many of us, students of color, doxxing left our jobs uncertain, our safety uncertain, our well-being uncertain.

Now, we are in a moment of intense division and disagreement in our community over the events in Gaza. I see pain, uncertainty, and unrest across campus. It’s now, in a moment like this, that the power of “not knowing” becomes critical.

Maybe we don’t know what it’s like to be ethnically targeted. Maybe we don’t know what it's like to come face to face with violence and death. But, we don’t have to know.

Solidarity is not dependent on what we know, because “not knowing” is an ethical stance. It creates space for empathy, solidarity, and a willingness to listen.

I don’t know – so I ask. I listen. I believe an important type of learning takes place, especially in moments of uncertainty, when we lean into conversations without assuming we have all the answers. Can we see humanity in people we don’t know? Can we feel the pain of people with whom we disagree?

As we graduate, what we know , our material knowledge, may not matter so much anymore. The truth is, it’s what we don’t know and how we navigate it that will set us apart moving forward.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable. But I encourage you to dive into the deep end of discomfort, and as you do, bring with you a Beginner’s mind, an ethic of not knowing.

As Emily Dickinson had said, “Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door.”

Thank you, and Congratulations Class of 2024!

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Integrative biology concentrator julie heng awarded hoopes prize for thesis research conducted in the murray lab.

• May 30, 2024

Integrative Biology (IB) concentrator Julie Heng (‘24) has won a Hoopes Prize for thesis research she did in the Murray Lab . The university-wide Hoopes Prize celebrates excellence in undergraduate thesis work across all disciplines.

“It has been an extraordinary pleasure to work with Julie,” says MCB faculty Andrew Murray . “She had the courage to work on a poorly characterized genetic process, parameiosis, the persistence to complete and analyze a complicated and difficult set of experiments, and elegance and clarity to write an inspiring and beautiful thesis.”

IB concentrators typically conduct their thesis research in OEB labs, but Heng connected with Murray while she was a student in the course LS50. Once in the lab, Heng worked closely with postdoc María Angélica Bravo Núñez as her lab mentor . “One day after Zoom class, Andrew and I were talking about mating type switching and chromosomal change, and he invited me to do research in his lab over the summer,” Heng says. “Andrew talked about how the Murray Lab uses brewer’s yeast to examine all kinds of questions in experimental evolution, from the emergence of multicellularity to origins of the cell cycle. Brewer’s yeast seemed like a cool model for questions of non-Darwinian evolution and which I was thinking about. And I’ve had a blast and a half learning from everyone in the lab.”

For her thesis project, Heng looked into the fungus Candida albicans and the mechanisms that can cause it to have irregular numbers of chromosomes, or aneuploidy. Understanding how aneuploidy develops could shed light on how fungal pathogens evolve drug resistance. “In this thesis, I developed two models that examine the relationship between and consequences of non-meiotic chromosome loss and aneuploidy. The first model studies an elusive chromosome loss process in C. albicans called “parameiosis.” I showed that 1) parameiosis rapidly generates aneuploidy, which increases population-wide variation in growth, fitness, and antifungal drug tolerance and 2) most strains that lose chromosomes also become more fit and drug tolerant. The second model discovers novel chromosome loss pathways in brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae . Using genetic crosses, I mapped the chromosome loss phenotype of a representative strain to a mutation (I425F) in the gene TDA9 and confirmed its role by CRISPR engineering.” 

“I’m deeply grateful to Prof. Andrew Murray, who is kind and brilliant and full of aphoristic wisdom,” Heng adds. “Endless gratitude to María Angélica Bravo Núñez, HHMI postdoctoral fellow in the lab, who taught me just about everything, from how to use a pipette properly on day one. María is a role model and an inspiration, one of the hardest working and supportive people I know, and I have deeply enjoyed learning from and with her, whether seriously interrogating problems in academia or bantering about the rise of the fungi together. Thanks also to the rest of the Murray Lab, a delightful team that banters with and challenges each other: Abe Sabbarini, Alexa Pérez-Torres, Piyush Nanda, Jimena Luque, Athena Rogers, Kevin Woods, and of course Linda Kefalas.” Heng, who earned a secondary in Philosophy alongside her IB concentration, will work on technology policy after graduation. “During college, these two interests [evolution and ethics] dovetailed, especially with the rise and dynamism of emerging technologies,” she says. “My research looks at rapid change in biological systems, but this mirrors social systems as well. So much is changing; how should we think about biotech and AI, about wellbeing and risk, about community and loneliness? Current conversations about science and technology are narrow and exclusive, but can still have outsized impact on how we all live. I’m planning to pursue emerging tech policy to help make these conversations more pluralistic and more focused on well-being.”

Heng’s colleagues and mentors praised her ingenuity. “Julie arrived at the Murray lab as an incredibly curious, smart student with minimal lab skills,” says Murray Lab postdoc María Angélica Bravo Núñez, who mentored Heng. “She is, however, incredibly dedicated and from the beginning showed that her detective skills were second to none. During her first summer in the lab, I gave a strain to Julie that had >30 mutations and she needed to find which of those mutations was causing the phenotype. By the end of the summer, not only had Julie mapped the causative allele, but she had also reconstructed it and tested it in a naïve background. That was not an easy task, yet she executed it flawlessly.”

Bravo Núñez adds, “Julie is an incredible scientist that doesn’t shy away from hard questions. For her thesis project, she ventured into understanding the mechanism and implications of an unknown cell cycle in a human fungal pathogen. For her work and dedication, the thesis reviewers granted her an ‘exceptional’ score and she was also awarded the Hoopes prize. She deserves this and so much more. And while we (The Murray Lab) are sad to see her go, we are also very excited to see how Julie will change the world next.”

Julie Heng (left) and María Angélica Bravo Núñez

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Harvard Says It Will No Longer Take Positions on Matters Outside of the University

The policy could ease pressure on the school to issue statements on current events. Officials were criticized for their handling of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

By Vimal Patel and Anemona Hartocollis

Harvard said on Tuesday that it would now avoid taking positions on matters that are not “relevant to the core function of the university,” accepting the recommendations of a faculty committee that urged the university to dramatically reduce its messages on issues of the day.

If put into practice, Harvard would no longer issue official statements of empathy, which it did for Ukraine, after the Russian invasion, and for the victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, for example.

“In issuing official statements of empathy, the university runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others,” the report said. “And because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.”

The university’s Institutional Voice Working Group, made up of eight faculty members, issued the report, with a set of principles and a recommended path forward, which the administration and governing board accepted.

“Harvard isn’t a government,” Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor and a co-chair of the committee that developed the recommendations, said in an interview with The Harvard Gazette , released Tuesday as part of the university’s announcement. “It shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy.”

The report, however, did not fully embrace “institutional neutrality” — a principle promoted by the University of Chicago, in which universities commit to staying out of political and social matters. Some universities, including Stanford University and Northwestern, announced shortly after the Hamas attack that they would adopt the policy.

Mr. Feldman said though the recommendations had some overlap with institutional neutrality, there were also differences.

A key difference, Mr. Feldman said to The Gazette, is that “as an institution with values, we have a responsibility to promote our core function as an educational institution and defend ourselves against forces that seek to undermine our academic values. In that sense, we aren’t neutral, and we can’t be.”

In an interview, Mr. Feldman provided examples about when Harvard should weigh in on political matters. He mentioned a proposal by former President Donald J. Trump to collect “billions and billions of dollars” by taxing large private university endowments. Advocating against such a plan, he said, “would fall squarely within the function of the university.”

Mr. Feldman also noted that Harvard advocated for affirmative action in the courts, and that admissions policy “would count as a core function of the university.”

Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at the University of Chicago, said neither of those examples run afoul of Chicago’s stance on neutrality. Nevertheless, he said, he supported Harvard’s new position.

One of the first sentences in the Harvard report states that the university is not institutionally neutral but then the rest of the report describes how it is committing to institutional neutrality, Mr. Ginsburg said.

“Their policies look like they’re converging in the direction that many other schools have moved in,” Mr. Ginsburg said. “But they don’t want to admit that.”

One reason for that, Mr. Ginsburg said, is that some quarters of the academy see neutrality as a misleading term, with many believing silence itself is taking a stance. Others view it as an impossibility.

“There is no such thing as institutional neutrality,” Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, said on Tuesday. “Those who claim they are going to abide by it find a myriad fallback positions in which they say, ‘but not in this case.’ When it comes to matters of political salience, universities will do what they’ve always done. Institutional neutrality is a false flag.”

For years, universities had, mostly without controversy, issued messages on any number of world and local events, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to racism at home. But perhaps unlike any other issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict split university communities, and clarified the downsides of such statements on highly contested topics.

Harvard came under withering criticism for how it communicated after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

Harvard, for some critics, like the university’s former president Lawrence H. Summers, was woefully slow in denouncing a pro-Palestinian letter by a student coalition, which held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for the unfolding violence.” Dr. Summers suggested that the void left by Harvard’s slow response had allowed the student statement to stand as the university’s official position in the minds of some people.

After Harvard’s president at the time, Claudine Gay, released a series of statements, including one that condemned the “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and called them “abhorrent,” the administration was accused of capitulating to influential alumni and wealthy donors. She ended up resigning, in part for her handling of the protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Mr. Feldman said the transition would not be easy. It would require a culture change, for people inside and outside of the university to accept that “the university has genuinely adopted a ‘say less’ policy,” he told The Gazette.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture. More about Vimal Patel

Anemona Hartocollis is a national reporter for The Times, covering higher education. More about Anemona Hartocollis

The Campus Protests Over the Gaza War

News and Analysis

​Harvard said that it will no longer take positions on matters outside of the university , accepting the recommendations of a faculty committee that urged the school to reduce its messages on issues of the day.

​Weeks after counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, the university police have made the first arrest related to the attack .

​​A union for academic workers in the University of California system announced that an ongoing strike challenging the system’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations would extend to two more campuses , U.C.L.A. and U.C. Davis.

The Battle Over College Speech:  ​University demonstrations over the war in Gaza have reignited the debate over campus speech, and have led to a rethinking of who sets the terms for language in academia .

Making Sense of the Protests:  In the weeks leading up to graduation, our reporter spoke with more than a dozen students at Columbia University and Barnard College about how the campus protests had shaped them .

A Complex Summer:  Many university leaders and officials may be confronting federal investigations, disputes over student discipline  — and the prospect that the protests start all over again in the fall.

A New Litmus Test:  Some Jewish students say their views on Zionism — which are sometimes assumed — have affected their social life on campus .

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Harvard university will no longer weigh in on outside public matters: ‘runs the risk of alienating some’.

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Harvard University announced Tuesday that it will stay silent on public matters that do not directly concern its “core function” — months after the Ivy League school’s statements on the Israel-Hamas war caused a firestorm of controversy.

Leaders at the prestigious school who recommended the new policy said that Harvard “runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others” by issuing public statements on sweeping issues and global politics.

“And because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” Harvard’s Institutional Voice Working Group recommended in a report.

The report noted that “[t]he university and its leaders should not . . . issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function”

Harvard said Tuesday that the school “accepted” the working group’s recommendations.

“The process of translating these principles into concrete practice will, of course, require time and experience, and we look forward to the work ahead,” interim president Alan Garber said in a statement .

As part of the new initiative, Harvard will no longer issue official statements concerning wars, like it had following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February and for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The latter ignited a firestorm for the school and former President Claudine Gay.

Gay had condemned the “barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas,” but faced intense scrutiny for not criticizing 30 Harvard student groups that published a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ terror attack.

The former president resigned weeks after testifying before Congress and following plagiarism allegations.

The working group was established in April to debate how much and when the university should comment on far-reaching issues beyond Harvard’s jurisdiction.

It found that the “integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise,” and that any comment will inevitably come under intense pressure.

“Those pressures, coming from inside and outside the university, will distract energy and attention from the university’s essential purpose,” the report states.

“The university is not a government, tasked with engaging the full range of foreign and domestic policy issues, and its leaders are not, and must not be, selected for their personal political beliefs.”

Rather than put out statements regarding global issues, Harvard’s working group suggests discussing the topic inside the classrooms, where debate is encouraged and a permanent stance would not be required.

Moving forward, Harvard will decline requests for official statements, referring to this new policy.

The policy announcement comes just days after Harvard’s commencement speaker blasted the Ivy League school for not allowing more than a dozen students to receive their diplomas.

Shruthi Kumar, the Harvard senior selected to deliver the English address during the ceremony, said Harvard had displayed an “intolerance for freedom of speech” for denying the students who had taken part in an anti-Israel campus encampment on school grounds.

More than 1,000 people then staged a walkout to decry the disqualification of the 13 students, with many chanting “let them walk.”

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