harvard phd application political science

Doctoral Program Admissions

In this section.

• How to Apply
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You have an idea that, through research, can be translated into new ways to confront big questions and challenges head on, to make our world better.

The Doctoral Programs housed at Harvard Kennedy School are jointly administered with the  Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences  (Harvard Griffin GSAS) to prepare you for a future in academia or policymaking that demands advanced knowledge of economics, political science, and social policy.

Bring your ideas and research to life. Apply .

Ask what you can do.

“To me, ‘ask what you can do’ is a challenge: how can we do or be better? How can we be better people, better public servants, better researchers? It is a challenge to avoid complacency and to push the boundaries of what we think is possible.”

Sara lowes, peg phd 2017.

Information for prospective graduate students

Like all of my colleagues, I receive a large number of email queries from prospective students about the application process to Harvard's Government Department. In case it's helpful, then, a couple of pieces of advice specific to the graduate program here at Harvard, before some more general advice about graduate school applications, including some thoughts from friends and colleagues in the discipline:

You may wish to consult the information posted on the Government department website , which has more details about the program and admissions process, as well as descriptions of research interests of current graduate students and faculty members. Unlike PhD programs in other disciplines/countries, our admissions process does not rely on faculty sponsors: that is, if you’re admitted, you’re admitted to the program more generally, rather than to work with a specific faculty member. In this sense, because the admissions process is centralized, and there aren't particular slots reserved for particular supervisors, you don’t need to go through the hassle of contacting individual faculty members to tell them that you're applying, ask them if they're taking graduate students (we are!), or ask them to sign off on your application or research interests. (There is a misperception that contacting faculty of interest increases your odds of getting in; it does not. The application website at Harvard includes a box where applicants can indicate which faculty they've been in touch with, but to my knowledge, no one looks at this.) Similarly, the sheer number of applications we receive (in a 1993 PS article, King, Bruce and Gilligan report the Government department was receiving ~700 applications a year) means that it's logistically impossible for us to meet with all of the prospective applicants who might wish to do so. The good news is that because the admissions process is centralized, this isn't something you need to do anyway! If you're admitted to the program, we'll fly you in to meet with us, so you'll have ample chance to meet with us then, figure out if the program is a good fit, and so on.

General advice about graduate school applications in political science

One of the challenges about offering more general advice about applying to PhD programs in political science is that the process is so idiosyncratic, both across subfields (a competitive file in political theory might look very different than in American politics), across institutions (some schools care a lot about subfield divisions, and others don't believe in subfields altogether), across time (who happens to be on the admissions committee that year often determines which files make it to the top), and across space (the information below is probably the most useful for applications to schools in the United States). Moreover, given structural changes in post-secondary education that have shrunk the size of the academic job market, there are plenty of good arguments against doing a PhD! The advice below, then, is focused less on the question of whether you should apply to PhD programs (though some of the advice from colleagues below speaks to this point), and more on demystifying the admissions process itself. In general you can think of graduate school applications as a signaling problem. Admissions committees are looking through hundreds upon hundreds of applications spanning thousands upon thousands of pages, trying to predict from your file whether you'll be able to succeed in their graduate program. At many of the top PhD programs, then, it's not about trying to figure out whether you're smart, but about trying to figure out if you're ready. So, committees are going to be looking for signals to help gauge how ready you are, both in your materials, and in letters from your letter writers. Here are a couple of things I wish I knew about this process when I was applying to graduate school.

Signaling you understand the field

Sometimes advisors will tell you about the importance of asking an interesting question in your research statement, but this isn't very actionable advice, because few of us deliberately study things we think are boring — and how do you know if your question will count as interesting to admissions committees? A better way to think about this is as an encouragement to do some reading. Academic disciplines are collective enterprises, in which scholarship is produced in conversation with others. Your research statement is a chance to show that you understand where the conversation is going. If you take a look at the recent books published in your subfield of interest at Princeton University Press or Cambridge University Press , for example, and read the first chapters of the ones that interest you (often times the first chapters are available free online!), what sorts of questions are they about? Take a look at articles published recently in the journals where the faculty you want to work have published. If some of them seems interesting to you, read them, along with some of the other articles they cite. Read pieces written by the faculty you want to work with too. The more you read, the better the sense you'll have of the landscape of the field, and the better sense you'll have about how to "sell" your interests. This is also helpful because sometimes the way we're exposed to the field in the introductory undergraduate classes that first hook us on the topic may not represent the state of the discipline. Similarly, when I was applying to PhD programs, the field looked very different in Canada, where I was from, than in the United States. You should ask one of your advisers to take a look at your research statement to solicit their feedback before you send off your application. Signaling you understand the field also matters in other ways: in your statement of purpose, if all of the faculty members you indicate you're interested in working with are outside of your subfield of interest, or who do work of a very different style (e.g. you want to do game theory, and they do critical theory, or vice versa), or are all in a different department, that can be a sign to admissions committees that you haven't done your homework.

Signaling you understand how to do research

If being a successful undergraduate student is typically about being a skilled consumer of research, being a successful graduate student is typically about being a skilled producer of research. Having previous research experience is valuable not only because it will teach you whether you really want to apply for grad school in the first place, but also because it will help you better understand the field , help you produce a strong writing sample , and help you get stronger letters . Not everyone gets the chance to do a lot of research in college, but research experience can take a variety of forms, from writing a senior or master's thesis, to working as a research assistant, either in college or afterwards. The kind of research experience you'd want to have is likely is going to vary based on the kind of work you're interested in doing (e.g. in parts of comparative politics, many applicants often have spent a year working as an RA or predoctoral associate running studies and analyzing data, which isn't necessarily the norm in quadrants of the field that don't rely as heavily on field experiments), but more experience is usually better than less. There are also a number of programs that offer research opportunities to college graduates from historically underrepresented groups. If this applies to you, you should speak to one of your advisers.

What makes an informative writing sample?

Some writing samples are more informative than others. If possible, your writing sample should be a solo-authored piece (i.e., isn't coauthored with one of your advisors, whereupon admissions committees might be unsure about how much of the work you did, even if you did the whole thing!), written in the subfield you're interested in studying (i.e. if you want to study American politics, your writing sample should ideally be about American politics, not IR). Ideally, it should also be consistent with the norms of academic research in whatever subfield you're studying (for most subfields, it shouldn't just be a literature review, political commentary, or a book report, say).

What makes a useful letter of reference?

The most helpful letters come from faculty members who can speak to your ability to conduct academic research in the discipline you want to study. Letters from celebrities, politicians, your boss in a non-research-based job, and so on, are going to be less useful to you, since they can't credibly speak to what you need your letters to speak to. This is another reason why having research experience before applying to graduate school is useful, since letter writers who you work as a research assistant for are well positioned to speak to your abilities in this front. Similarly, although it's not at all the case that you need to be a political science major in college in order to get into political science PhD programs, you do want to have at least one of your letters come from a political scientist, ideally in the subfield you want to study. (Chemists and comparative literature professors, say, can speak to your ability to do research, but not necessarily your ability to conduct research in political science).

Strong GRE scores

When I was applying to graduate school, I assumed that everyone understood that standardized tests were noisy and imperfect measures and that admissions committees wouldn't place much weight on them. Suffice it to say, the admissions committees at the schools I applied to disagreed! Regardless of how much weight committees should place on the GRE (although many critiques of the diagnostic value of the GRE suffer from some methodological flaws ), however, many do take them into account (although some departments have made them optional in recent cycles). For those programs that do require GREs, these scores are useful because they provide one of the few metrics in common across files that typically differ from one another along a large number of dimensions. (When I'm on admissions, I might not know how to compare a 3.9 GPA at school X with a 3.7 GPA in a different program of study at school Y, but I know how to compare a 168 GRE with a 160). You're unlikely to get into a graduate program just because of your GRE score (we reject applicants with 170/170 GREs all the time!), but doing well on the GRE (especially the quantitative score, since that's the part of the test that applicants tend to perform the most poorly on in relative terms) will be helpful. What counts as doing well will depend on the program to which you're applying (see some of the suggestions below for details).

Skills relevant to your proposed program of study

To some extent, your GPA matters less than the courses you've taken, or skills you've acquired. Admissions committees want to know whether you have the skills you need to do the research you're interested in. If you're interested in doing political economy-style work, a 4.0 GPA without any economics or math classes will be less helpful than a lower GPA that includes more technical coursework. Similarly, it's hard to study East Asian politics if you don't speak or have never studied any East Asian languages.

Additional resources

Finally, a number of friends and colleagues in the discipline have put together some helpful resources with advice about applying to PhD programs in political science in general, and in international relations in particular: "Should I Get a PhD?" is an interview-based site run by Tim Hopper that isn't specific to political science, but offers lots of helpful suggestions more generally about the more fundamental question of whether you should apply for a PhD in the first place. Dan Nexon has helpful advice at the Duck of Minerva on applying for a PhD in political science, and how to make your application more competitive. Nuno Monteiro has great advice both on how to decide whether to go to graduate school, and the tradeoffs between PhD programs (like those offered by the Government department) and MA programs (which the Government department doesn't currently offer as a standalone degree). Erica Chenoweth has similarly helpful advice; her discussion of the difference between policy-oriented degrees (like those offered at the Harvard Kennedy School ) versus academic degrees (like those offered in the Government department) is especially valuable. Steven Wilkinson has useful advice especially relevant for international applicants. Terri E. Givens has a series of helpful articles at Inside Higher Education on her graduate school experiences, especially relevant for first-generation students, and students of color. Duke's Sociology Department has a helpful FAQ page that's technically about applying to sociology PhD programs, but many of its suggestions apply to social science PhD programs more generally. Dan Drezner has a series of helpful posts at Foreign Policy on PhD programs in political science: see here for advice for undergraduates , here for advice for students who have already graduated , and here for advice on PhD applications for aspiring policymakers . Erin Simpson and Andrew Exum have helpful advice on the CNAS blog from the perspective of policymakers. Bradley Potter, Nathaniel Allen, and Torrey Taussig have helpful advice at War on the Rocks about good and not-so-good reasons to pursue a policy-oriented PhD. Chris Blattman has extensive advice on many of the above topics from a political economy perspective. Cyrus Samii has helpful advice on much of the above; his advice about applying to "boutique" departments is also particularly helpful. Justin Esarey has a helpful post on The Political Methodologist about how to know whether to apply to grad school in the first place, and if so, how to choose where to apply. Austin Carson has helpful advice on whether to go to grad school, along with what to do when you get there. Once you've been admitted to a PhD program, Chris Kennedy has useful advice about how to prepare for your first semester. Finally, here's some advice for early career researchers I was asked to put together by International Society of Political Psychology's Early Career Committee .

Undergraduate

The concentration in Government introduces students to the discipline of political science: the study of power in all of its many forms and consequences. The program aims both to prepare students to lead engaged civic lives and to introduce them to the ways in which political scientists explain and analyze the social and political world around them.

Harvard University’s Department of Government is dedicated to excellence in all fields of political science and encourages diverse approaches to scholarship. Students in the Department of Government pursue a wide variety of approaches to the study of politics and have the opportunity to define and explore their own questions about politics and government.

Graduate Students

Ahmet Akbiyik

Salvador Ascencio Pastora

Marco Aviña

Natalie Ayers

María Ballesteros

David A. Beavers

Sima Biondi

Mathis Bitton

David Boddy

Evelyn Boyden

Justin L. Brooks

António Câmara

Shelby Carvalho

Jeremiah Cha

Yi Ning Chang

Caterina Chiopris

Matthew Cohen

Aleksandra Conevska

Aidan Connaughton

Julia Coyoli

Angelo Dagonel

Matthew E. Dardet

Noah Dasanaike

Akshay Govind Dixit

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Soren Dudley

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Sarah Gustafson

Liya Haefner

Dimitrios Halikias

Kiara Hernandez

Molly Hickey

Brian Highsmith

Sophie E. Hill

Christopher Hopson

Serene Hung

Uma Ilavarasan

Tayla Ingles

Katherine Irajpanah

Jihwan Jeong

Charles Austin Jordan

Elsa B. Kania

Christopher Kenny

Sung In Kim

Max Kuhelj Bugaric

Hannah Kunzman

Miranda Lace

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Jeeyoung Lee

Taegyun Lim

Daniel Lowery

Hanning Luo

Dorothy Manevich

Hayley Manges

Joaquim Meira

Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez

Lucía Mendoza Mora

Priyanka Menon

Ethan Miles

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Sarah Mohamed

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Edward Ngai

Andrew O’Donohue

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Brian Palmiter

Sophie Pangle

Sun Young Park

Shannon Parker

Mafalda Pratas

Arjun Ramamurti

Reed Rasband

Hunter Rendleman

Daniel Roberts

James Rosenberg

Laura Royden

Jordan Rudinsky

Jan-Paul Sandmann

Adrian Scheibler

Margaret Schwenzfeier

Priyanka Sethy

Noah Quinn Shenker

Sooahn Shin

Tyler Simko

Julio S. Solís Arce

Rochelle Sun

David Sutton

Benjamin (Ben) TerMaat

Elizabeth Thom

Kevin K. Troy

Madai Urteaga Quispe

Dominic J. Valentino

Jean Vilbert

Shivram Viswanathan

Jacob Waggoner

Benjamin Waldman

Kirsten Walters

Aaron Watanabe

Willie Webb

Julius Wilson

Olivia Woldemikael

George Yean

PhD Program Requirements

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Harvard Griffin GSAS strives to provide students with timely, accurate, and clear information. If you need help understanding a specific policy, please contact the office that administers that policy.

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Political Science-Prep (PS-Prep) 2023

Interested in applying to graduate programs in political science?

Great! The Harvard Department of Government (academic political science) community is thrilled to announce the fourth annual Political Science-Prep (PS-Prep) , an informational and mentoring event for individuals interested in pursuing doctorates in political science.

Who is this program for?

The goal of this workshop is to help students who are underrepresented in PhD programs with their applications to graduate school in political science. PS-Prep offers participants the opportunity to ask important questions and to receive feedback that they may not otherwise receive without the workshop. Past participants have come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We encourage you to submit an application even if you are unsure whether you match this section's description. Interested applicants from any institution or organization are invited to apply!

Why is Harvard Government doing this?

The Harvard Department of Government is actively and intentionally committing to building an inclusive field. While we intend to be more intentional about increasing diversity and support for diverse individuals within our own department, we also feel strongly that we should help underrepresented students pursue training in political science no matter what institutions they're interested in, because the field needs everything you have to offer! As such, our goal in offering this workshop is to help you put your best foot forward as you apply widely for training opportunities in political science.

What is the format?

Our community of graduate students and faculty will hold a free day of informal panel discussions. You will also be paired with current members of our department (i.e., faculty and graduate students) who will provide structured feedback on the materials you intend to use to apply to Ph.D. programs in political science.

What will the application feedback portion look like?

You will receive feedback on your research statement, or a brainstorm about how to approach it if you haven’t started yet.

How do I apply?

Click here to apply!

What's the application like?

The application is estimated to take between 7 and 15 minutes. It consists of a few quick questions about your background and identities that you hold, as well as a single short response question asking for information about you, your interests, research experience, and why you're interested in this program.  This application is meant to be very informal!

Is this only for people who are applying to positions at Harvard?

Nope! You can apply to this workshop regardless of whether or not you plan to apply to Harvard (though we hope you'll apply to Harvard as well)!  Please Note: that this event is NOT associated with admissions to Harvard University.

How are participants selected?

We will first review applications to ensure selection criteria are met. Then, we will randomly select from this pool by sub-discipline (i.e., American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory) to form a cohort for the event. We are using random selection to comprise the final cohort of attendees to ensure a maximally equitable selection process. 

Important Dates:

Friday, November 3rd, 2023 : PS-Prep applications are due

Monday, November 6th, 2023 : you will receive email notification of PS-Prep admission decision

Saturday, November 11th, 2023 : the informal, live event will take place virtually (via Zoom)

Week of November 13th : Peer/faculty feedback on application materials

Eligibility Requirements:

At least 18 years of age

Important Notes:

Priority will be given to individuals who are planning on applying for Ph.D. programs in political science THIS CYCLE (i.e., applying in Fall 2023 to begin a PhD program in Fall 2024).

If you have questions about this event or the application, please email [email protected] . 

Can Harvard Win Back America's Respect?

Harvard has had such a bad year that it has decided to shut up about politics.

Harvard has had a very bad year. It began last summer with the Supreme Court’s verdict in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard , which declared that the university’s admissions policies were unconstitutionally discriminatory—or in plain terms, racist. Then came October 7, when Hamas unilaterally broke a cease-fire to attack Israel, killing 1,200 and kidnapping some 250, with many of the horrific atrocities captured on camera. Harvard, along with many elite universities, issued public statements that revealed, to put it delicately, an absence of moral clarity. Then came the disaster of Claudine Gay’s testimony in Congress, followed by the humiliating exposé of her history of plagiarism, followed by her grudging resignation. 

More recently we have had the further humiliation of our interim president’s negotiations with the small pro-Palestinian encampments in Harvard Yard. While other college presidents have had the nerve to call in the police and clear out illegal encampments, our president chose a two-state solution and negotiated. He gave relatively little away, but it was enough to reward the protestors for their efforts, guaranteeing more of the same in the future. 

The undergraduate Administrative Board took the bold step of suspending the thirteen seniors involved in the protest pending further review of their cases, which meant they were unable to take their degrees in last week’s graduation ceremonies. However, on Monday of graduation week, a rump meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (only 15 percent of professors showed up, mostly activists) passed a motion (despite it being out of order) to allow the students to graduate. The faculty was overruled by the Corporation, Harvard’s senior governing board, in a surprising show of good sense. This did not prevent various forms of moral exhibitionism about the sainted Thirteen during the graduation ceremony itself, acerbically described in the conservative student paper, the Salient . 

This turbulence and humiliation has not played well in the outside world, particularly among Jewish alumni or the 79 percent of Americans (according to a recent Harvard Caps/Harris poll ) who support Israel over Hamas. Only Wednesday, Harvard graduate Senator John Fetterman, in a graduation speech at Yeshiva University, dramatically took off his Harvard hood (he has a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), saying it wasn’t right for him to wear a symbol of Harvard given its “inability to stand up for the Jewish community after October 7.”

If the news coming out of Harvard is about its scientific and scholarly achievements and not about its political stances, public attitudes will change.

I am one of those ivory-tower professors you read about (the view from the ivory tower, by the way, is amazing !) and I’ve followed most of these events from afar, via the listserv commentaries of my colleagues on the Council for Academic Freedom . CAFH, as it is known for short, is a Harvard faculty group founded in 2023. We have discussed over the course of the year various ways the university might act to prevent a further slide into the abyss. In the fall, the discussions were mostly about how to limit or eliminate the influence of the DEI bureaucracy (at Harvard the expression is EDIB: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging), whether and how to prohibit diversity statements , how to stop the silencing of heterodox (i.e. non-woke) opinion, and how to introduce more viewpoint diversity. Much energy was expended on defining the scope and nature of academic freedom (my views are here ), and considering what principles the university should declare and how they should be enforced. 

This spring a frequent subject of discussion has been whether we should organize a university-wide faculty senate like Berkeley’s to fight back against the unaccountable power of administrators; what limits should be placed on activism; and how the university can recover its proper telos and maintain neutrality on issues of partisan politics. These discussions have borne some fruit. CAFH has some very impressive members, including a former president of Harvard (Larry Summers), many former deans and department heads, and we are in sympathetic contact with multiple members of the governing boards, the current interim president, and the new provost , whose appointment was one of the clearest signs of Harvard’s intention to reform itself. 

Pressure from CAFH, concerned alumni, and some elements within the Harvard administration led Interim President Garber in April to announce the formation of the Institutional Voice Working Group. According to the Harvard Gazette , an official publication (wags call it Harvard’s Pravda ), the group was tasked with “the question of whether and when Harvard as a University should speak on matters of social and political significance and who should be authorized to speak for the institution as a whole.” The group issued its report on Tuesday this week, and it was immediately accepted by the administration and endorsed by the Corporation as university policy. It is the clearest sign yet of the university’s intention to take more vigorous damage control measures and perhaps alter the ship’s direction entirely. Whether it will be enough to restore the immense respect Harvard once enjoyed with the public is, however, doubtful. 

The Institutional Voice statement is commendable in certain respects. Its premise is stated in the first sentence, “The purpose of the university is to pursue truth.” The pursuit of truth is the university’s one moral imperative, which it must defend to the general public. The pursuit of truth requires “open inquiry, debate, and the weighing of evidence.” So far so good. The statement shows a firm grasp of the obvious, and the obvious is ordinarily difficult for academics to get their heads around. Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, once wrote that the definition of a professor is “someone who thinks otherwise.” For the eight members of the committee to converge on the obvious is an achievement.

Defending truth means ensuring the conditions of free inquiry and if “outside forces” (read: Governor DeSantis) “seek to determine what students the university can admit, what subjects it can teach, or which research it supports,” the university must defend its autonomy. This principle is an excellent and necessary one for private universities, but less defensible for public ones (as I’ve argued here ). 

A president can, by precept and example, create an ethos among university administrators that public comment on partisan political issues is inappropriate.

The statement further argues that when the university makes a habit of issuing official statements that can be interpreted as politically partisan, it undermines its mission and makes those in the community who don’t agree feel alienated, even threatened. It should no longer issue such statements, and any persons who do so in the name of the university should be disavowed. Instead of issuing public statements in support of one group or another (read: Jews or Palestinian sympathizers) it should counsel unhappy students through its “pastoral arms in the different schools and residential houses to support affected community members. It must dedicate resources to training staff most directly in contact with affected community members.” Less official bombast, more therapy. 

Overall, the statement is a step in the right direction, but I doubt whether it will do much to change Harvard’s image as a politically partisan institution. Princeton has had for some years a policy of “institutional restraint” on expressions of partisan politics, but that did not stop various entities within the university from speaking in its name to condemn the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade two years ago. The partisan political atmosphere at Princeton made it impossible for the university to disavow them. Despite the existence of CAFH (which represents less than 5 percent of the professoriate at Harvard), there is little reason to expect that Harvard’s faculty would exercise any more “restraint.” 

In fact, it seems unlikely that either the Harvard faculty or its administration will engage with any project to depoliticize the university. (The number of persons in the Harvard administration has never been publicly acknowledged for obvious reasons, though the well-informed Ira Stoll estimates it at four times the number of faculty.) In part, this is a long-standing structural issue. As Bernard Bailyn explained many years ago in a brilliant and charming piece for the Harvard Magazine (“ Fixing the Turnips “), American universities, even Harvard, from the beginning were public institutions meant to serve civic purposes. Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, they have always been uncomfortable with the Aristotelian idea that there are some things worth learning for their own sakes, apart from any social benefit they might yield. This attitude often mystified British scholars who came to American universities and observed their highly instrumentalized attitude to learning. Bailyn quotes an article by Isaiah Berlin, who had lectured at Harvard in 1949 and found ludicrous the faculty’s bad conscience—their uneasy sense that their scholarly interests were frivolous in view of the sufferings of mankind.

A student or professor in this condition wonders whether it can be right for him to continue to absorb himself in the study of, let us say, the early Greek epic at Harvard, while the poor of south Boston go hungry and unshod, and negroes are denied fundamental rights. … With society in a state of misery or injustice [the scholar, the aspiring student, feels] his occupation is a luxury which it should not be able to afford; and from this flows the feeling that if only he can devote some—perhaps the greater part—of his time to some activity more obviously useful to society, work for a Government department, or journalism, or administration and organization of some kind, etc., he might still with this pay for the right to pursue his proper subject (now rapidly, in his own eyes, acquiring the status of a private hobby).

Given this history, American universities are always going to have a strong sense of their duty to the outside world. The ideal of institutional neutrality, or of ordering a university’s activities towards a purely academic telos, is ultimately foreign to the American tradition of higher education. Princeton’s motto is perfectly typical in this regard: “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” There is all too slippery a slope between the idea of service to the public and the preaching of one’s partisan political views. As Jonathan Haidt showed years ago in The Righteous Mind , individuals on the left of the political spectrum have difficulty recognizing views other than their own as morally legitimate. (The right does much better in this respect.) Most faculty don’t think of their views as political at all; they think of them as simply moral. So long as most college faculties keep recycling their leftish political monocultures, universities committed to public service are going to sound to the great American public like the research arm of the Democratic party. 

So what is to be done? Many people at Harvard still don’t care very much what persons in the outside world think, but after the experiences of this year, with large fall-offs in alumni giving and in the number of high school students applying for early admission, the more serious people here are ready to act. Given the likely hostility of most faculty and administrators to any project of depoliticization, the best hope of reform will have to come from the top. 

Fortunately, the president of Harvard since the time of Charles William Eliot in the nineteenth century has always wielded considerable institutional power and resources. These could be used to project a more favorable image of the university and win renewed respect. A determined president who resisted the temptations of collegiality has the power to transfer, say, resources from the administration (does the university really need sixty Title IX coordinators? Do we really need quite so many vice presidents?) to the teaching staff. He has the power to see that departments hire distinguished faculty of his choosing in fields that are far from politics. 

This used to be the job of our university president. I remember hearing Peter Brown, a famous Princeton historian of late antiquity, jokingly complaining that he could not come near Harvard without Derek Bok offering him a job. Derek Bok had a brain trust whose principal role was to search out distinguished faculty in all fields and bring them to Harvard. One opportunity cost of Harvard’s obsession with identity politics in recent years is that the search for excellent faculty has taken second place to hiring faculty with high intersectional scores. My experience of nearly forty years on the Harvard faculty has taught me that a department can always find some highly placed authority who will tell it that the faculty person it wants to hire is brilliant and doing ground-breaking work. Finding true excellence, however—finding the truly exceptional person whose achievements will make the best students want to study at Harvard—is an altogether more difficult task. But it has been done in the past and can be done again.

If a president and a few well-chosen deans know what excellence is, set real standards, and back the best candidates with ample funding, an institutional culture can quickly change. A president of Harvard also has the power to use the university’s extraordinary resources in public relations to foreground the work of its best scientists and scholars. He or she can make sure the world knows the wonderful things that are being done by our faculty and researchers. If the news coming out of Harvard is about its scientific and scholarly achievements and not about its political stances, public attitudes will change. Intemperate persons on the right who want to punish the university will have a harder time doing it if the country is more aware of the good things Harvard has been doing. A president can also, by precept and example, create an ethos among university administrators that public comment on partisan political issues is inappropriate. Such an ethos existed among administrators when I came to Harvard in 1985 and it should be possible to restore it. The university has traditions of science and scholarship unequaled by any university in the world and, under the right leadership, the country will come to value the university’s achievements again, and for the right reasons. 

Essay The World We Have Lost James Hankins

Essay America’s Transfer State John O. McGinnis

Essay The Art of Remembrance Titus Techera

Essay An Entitlement Wake-Up Call Thomas Savidge

Harvard vows to step back from politically charged statements. Will businesses be next?

A fter months of turmoil and sharp criticism from some alumni and donors, Harvard University said Tuesday that it would no longer take positions on issues that are not “relevant to the core function of the university.”

In doing so, the Ivy League school has not fully embraced “institutional neutrality” but is stepping away from statements that express solidarity and empathy, such as those the university issued after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ attack on Israel, and other potentially divisive topics that have nothing to do with education.

In other words, Harvard’s leadership has been suddenly stricken with a bout of common sense.

Cynics might say that the decision was necessary given public outcry over Harvard’s handling of student protests and the resulting withdrawal of financial support from wealthy donors like Bill Ackman and Kenneth Griffin. Even the resignation of former President Claudine Gay did little to stifle criticism of Harvard and other elite universities for enabling a climate in which antisemitism could fester. And some Republicans seized the upswell of anti-Ivy-League sentiment to argue that the schools should not have public support.

But even if the change is motivated by self-interest, in reversing course, Harvard has a chance to emerge from the turmoil as a leader, the shaper of values and thought that universities have historically wanted to be. It’s a long shot, but it also has an opportunity to win back the support of social conservatives.

It’s safe to say that wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card for this year.

In steering the public conversation toward the core function of institutions, Harvard is giving Americans something we desperately need: hope that we might someday return to a world in which our academic and corporate overlords aren’t preaching the gospel of progressivism. It’s not that big an ask, really.

The events of Oct. 7 largely overshadowed everything that happened earlier in 2023, but many of the headlines before Israel was attacked involved social conservatives pushing back against the progressive agenda that was being force-fed to them by companies determined to not just sell them stuff, but ideas.

Boycotts against Target and Bud Light had nothing to do with the quality of the goods being sold, and everything to do with the way they were being marketed. In fact, the boycotts were effective precisely because the boycotters liked Target and Bud Light; they just didn’t like companies seeming to take a stand on social issues, through relentless greenwashing, pinkwashing and bluewashing .

Similarly, for all the outcry about “elite universities” corrupting America’s youth, I’ve never known a parent who didn’t speak with pride of a child getting accepted into Harvard or Yale. There’s still a mystique about our great universities that persists despite the best efforts of the outrage machine. That’s one reason that there is something resembling relief in social media posts applauding Harvard’s decision. Book learnin’ and common sense, it seems, can coexist again.

Others approvingly noted on social media that the new Harvard policy, while not applicable to students, would apply to anyone authorized to speak on behalf of the university: “That should include the president, provost, and all deans as well as heads of departments, centers, and programs; it should also in principle extend to university governing boards and faculty bodies (such as faculty councils and the faculties of schools and departments acting collectively).”

Further, Harvard’s working group advised: “There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given issue is or is not directly related to the core function of the university. The university’s policy in those situations should be to err on the side of avoiding official statements.”

While in retrospect, many people might wonder why “the best and the brightest” are just now figuring out this last bit of wisdom, I think we can all agree on “better late than never” and hope that this policy proves infectious.

This approach reminded me of a remark made by President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who once said , “On contested issues, we (should) seek to moderate and to unify.”

Perhaps “avoid official statements” and “seek to moderate and to unify” aren’t exactly the same thing, but both approaches help to lower the temperature of our inflamed discourse in the public square. If Harvard wants to lead us to a place where corporate America and higher ed focus on their core missions alone, I’m all in — especially if the school can bring others along.

Earlier this year, The Free Press published an essay by Harvard alumnus and donor Bill Ackman titled “ How to Fix Harvard .” That was a remarkably hopeful headline at the time, conveying Ackman’s belief that Harvard could, in fact, be fixed, despite the “burn it all down” cries coming from so many on the right.

The statements coming out of Harvard this week suggest a welcome course correction, and despite some complaints that Harvard isn’t going all in on institutional neutrality, the turn of events deserves a grudging nod of respect, if not our full-throated applause.

June 2024: Dr. Kathryn D. Coduto (COM)

• By: Shannon Landis
• June 1, 2024

What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?

I love being able to answer questions about the world; I originally wanted to be a journalist for that exact reason. As I went through my undergraduate program, I discovered social scientific research and realized just how much I could do within this field. I also feel empowered by social science; there was a time when the idea of statistics was so intimidating to me. But now, I am confident in my ability to navigate complex questions  and   their solutions through a variety of tools and techniques, all stemming from social scientific training and exploration.

Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?

Dr. Allison McDonald, from the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, and I have been working on a project investigating sexting behaviors in romantic relationships. We specifically have asked people about how they negotiate, if they do, the sharing of this highly personal information with partners. I’m especially excited about this project, though, because we are also investigating what people do with sexual material once they’ve broken up. There isn’t much research in this area yet, and I think we’re getting really rich insights into how people are thinking about handling sensitive content throughout the lifetime of a relationship. I recently presented this work at the CHI 2024 conference and got some great feedback on potential design implications for improving technologies in these instances. We have another part of the study we’re hoping to launch soon, too.

What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?

I had great advisors for both my master’s degree (Dr. Danielle Coombs at Kent State University) and my doctoral degree (Dr. Jesse Fox at Ohio State University). They both always encouraged me to follow my interests, and I always felt supported in exploring the ideas I was most passionate about. I think following your interests is critical to staying interested in and excited by the work you do; I love thinking about research and so much of that is because I study the things I am most interested in. I now pass that advice along to my own advisees, too—follow your interests!

What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?

I love teaching Communication Research (CM 722). Comm Research is many students’ first experience with social scientific research, especially in a communication context, and I love helping them realize how much they can do with research. I am always so excited when I see different concepts click into place for students, whether that be perfecting a research design, conducting a statistical analysis, or crafting implications from their research. It is always so rewarding.  

Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.

Before coming to BU, I was an assistant professor at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. My favorite place in the world is still Badlands National Park in western South Dakota—I haven’t been anywhere that can top it!

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