Jack sat down among a group of fellow students, who seemed engaged in intense conversation. As soon as he had joined them, however, he realized that they were repeating the same word over and over. “Truth, truth, truth,” said one. “Troo-f, tr-U-th, truth,” replied another. “Truth? Tuh-ruth…” posited a third. “What is this?” Jack finally interjected, and they all turned to stare at him. Finally, one explained, “We are coming to mutual understanding. About truth, I mean. Yes, mutual understanding about truth.” Jack was still confused: “How does this get you closer to truth?” But the group’s interlocutor was incredulous: he exclaimed, “Why, in just these past, heated minutes, I have learned, I have understood, that he,” and he pointed, “says ‘Truf’ while she prefers ‘Trooth.’ Now, I don’t know what to think about my own ‘T-rrr-uth!’” Jack was unsure what to say. Satisfied, the interlocutor patted him on the back and reassured, “You’ll get the hang of it. In the meantime, help yourself to some of our hors d’oeuvres, generously funded by Intellectual Vitality.”
This (admittedly contrived) scenario reflects a fundamental crisis of merit in one of Harvard’s marquee programs: Intellectual Vitality. While it has intended and sometimes produced good, Intellectual Vitality’s failure to be discriminating in its funding has stripped the initiative of any sense of self, endangering its hopes of a productive future.
Intellectual Vitality comprises everything from pedagogy to fellowships, all in the name of furthering truth and debate. Besides a required first-year module, students are likely most familiar with Intellectual Vitality and its tenets via its event sponsorship and funding. There is good reason for this, too. Intellectual Vitality has doled out nearly $200,000 in grants to 37 different “Programs” or events since its public inception in February 2024. That translates to an average of about $5,240 in funding per program, which is startlingly higher than the HUA’s average semesterly club allocation in the 2024-2025 academic year, $947.36.1 Beyond the numbers, Intellectual Vitality privileges its “Programs” (the term it uses for its funded events and activities) in its marketing.
This quest to make Programs (and thus Intellectual Vitality) visible to the everyday Harvardian is embodied by the scheme’s limited funding criteria: four pithy bullet points that can be effectively summarized by the request that events contribute to “rigorous, reflective, and open-minded intellectual engagement.” Yet, what this seemingly innocuous ask — respectful exchange — belies is Intellectual Vitality’s ruinous refusal to commit to any sort of robustly meritocratic position about what it funds, and thus about what it is.
Put simply, in its funding structure, Intellectual Vitality has embraced pluralism for the sake of pluralism, conversation not so much for its substance but rather for the act of speech: the practice of moving one’s mouth, of feeling motion, and perceiving that motion in others — “Tuh-ruth” versus “trrrruth” without any regard for the value of what is being discussed.
Student leadership admits as much. According to one co-president of the Student Advisory Board in spring of last year, the objective of Intellectual Vitality’s funding is to “elevate a particular kind of conversation. [We are…] pretty agnostic about the actual content of the events.” The other co-president, quoted in the same article, doubles down on the strategy, affirming it is a demonstration of the “diversity of ways in which Intellectual Vitality could be done.”
Intellectual Vitality’s focus on form at the expense of content, however, is plainly counterproductive to what it was intended for and the ends it ought to serve.
To this end, Intellectual Vitality’s final bulletin of the 2025-2026 academic year is instructive. Among the three events featured, one was entitled “(Re)Discovering Wonder at Harvard and Beyond: Senior-Year Reflections on the Meaning of a College Education,” while another was a bipartisan, four-person panel of faculty and outside experts discussing “Efficiency or Erosion? The Future of Government Reform,” which centered on the question “Is government inefficiency the core problem — or is the deeper crisis the erosion of public trust and democratic investment?”2
Exploring questions about what higher education ought to look like can be worthwhile. Less so when the framing of that conversation is one of seniors’ “personal reflections” — so completely devoid of any real, broader implications or normative project for the academy.3 And while governance is a subject that is ripe for the sort of speech culture that Intellectual Vitality wants to cultivate, are government efficiencies really what get people going?4 Above all, are these sorts of conversations really going to end what Dean Rakesh Khurana described, in an email to undergraduates explaining Intellectual Vitality, as the pervasive student proclivity to say “what they thought others wanted to hear, for fear of being criticized or judged if they spoke their own minds”?
Emphatically no.
The fact of the matter is that no one was self-censoring because he thought his reminiscence on the college experience as a senior with one foot out the door or his take on government bureaucracy was going to get him 86’d. Intellectual Vitality’s current policies are based on a misguided conception of the hostile speech culture that has taken root at Harvard.
In reality, many Harvard students elected not to speak up because they thought, for instance, that their support for Israel or opposition to abortion was going to draw vitriol. In other words, it was always hot-button issues that chilled speech. When Intellectual Vitality affords such conversations equal weight as those that were never so controversial — when it embraces a funding scheme that would consider a discussion on citizenship in the United States and one on homesickness in college as equivalently deserving of and conducive to an initiative ostensibly aimed toward Veritas — the program makes a mockery of the very real conditions that necessitated its genesis.
Unmoored in this way, the terminus of Intellectual Vitality’s approach is not only that Intellectual Vitality ends up looking foolish; it is that Intellectual Vitality looks like nothing at all.
That is because when everything is Intellectual Vitality, nothing is. As such, it is probably no mistake that, back in 2024, Intellectual Vitality’s stalwart Dean Khurana felt obligated to clarify the term’s meaning, which The Crimson described then as concurrently “ubiquitous” and “mysterious.” Even now, if one asks members of the Student Advisory Board to define what precisely Intellectual Vitality is, they often couch the organization in exceedingly ambiguous terms. One Student Advisory Board member, for instance, when asked about defining Intellectual Vitality, responded: “I was really excited to come have what we would call intellectually vital conversations. I think I liked the term.” At the same time, Intellectual Vitality proudly and repeatedly defines itself first and foremost as a “spirit” — intangible, impossible to pin down, satisfied so long as one person walks out of an event having felt this “spirit” within them. The semantic diffusion that Intellectual Vitality has undergone is, on the one hand, spectacular in terms of its scale, but on the other, predictable of a group that has such a weak sense of self. By any measure, the term’s use has come to mirror this article’s opening scene: it is to say “truth” so much that the word loses all sense beyond the space it occupies on one’s tongue.
Still, Intellectual Vitality shows no signs of letting up. According to Dean of the College David Deming, “[Intellectual Vitality is] not something we’re ever going to finish.” To Deming’s credit, why should it be? An initiative with no heritage and no actual, determinable goal — an initiative that is not willing to commit itself to a hierarchy of pursuits, to anything beyond ambiguous, even meaningless terms — will necessarily persist, because it will always find something to subsume to its mission. The result of this can only be a forever-apparat: a (conveniently CV-boosting) cycle of deliberation and funding on a permanently amorphous basis.
If Intellectual Vitality wants to have any sort of serious and enduring influence on campus — if it wants to mean anything at all — it needs to remember its original purpose.
First, that Intellectual Vitality, at its core and at its best, is about big questions. It is about questions with stakes, with real bearing on how man orients his life, with a real bearing on Veritas. Secondly, that because of these stakes, Intellectual Vitality is maximally controversial. Intellectual Vitality was born out of a speech culture that was poisonous because it was dominated by passion, but such passion was not unfounded — it was an organic consequence of how important, and how divisive, the subjects in question were — and the initiative will thus effectuate the greatest change by funding and modelling respectful conversations that address those same, once-impossible-to-discuss but always indispensable, topics.
Critics will argue there are risks to this approach. If Intellectual Vitality adopts a privileged funding structure, they will say, it could fall into the trap of underfunding (or refusing to fund) events that are unpopular or controversial, and thus become an instrument for intolerance rather than a solution. But that is what an application process and board are for: to find people who are fair and discerning. It is reassuring in this respect that the faculty and student boards already comprise both liberal and conservative members, a representativeness that would only assume greater significance under a new funding strategy. What is more, requiring written feedback for events that do not receive funding would encourage Intellectual Vitality to be consistent and transparent in its application of criteria. And, for those events that would be rightly rejected, other funding sources exist: to demonstrate, the reader may comb through some of the incoming HUA co-presidents’ many, many campaign promises.
Most importantly, though, the alternative, the status quo, is Intellectual Vitality’s effective nonexistence — its nothingness.
This is unacceptable because Intellectual Vitality is a theoretically valuable and important program. Its present status, however, is grossly overinflated and has lost its way, so much so that the identity of Intellectual Vitality, not to mention its progress, is imperiled. To ameliorate this, the initiative must develop a meaningful standard for the events it funds and with which it associates.
This prioritization will demand reflection and iteration. It may not be universally appealing, but it will give substance to the initiative — it will show what “intellectual vitality” can actually mean, beyond merely an aggregation of polite, pointless conversations.
The first step in this process, however, is for the initiative to accept that not all Intellectual Vitality is created equal.
“Harvard Undergraduate Association Club Funding Report: Fiscal Year 2024-2025,” Harvard Undergraduate Association.
“THE IV BULLETIN. 2025-2026: ISSUE EIGHT,” Harvard College Intellectual Vitality, April 25, 2026.
Ibid.
Even granting that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was controversial, it is notable that the framing of the conversation in question is not about DOGE. To frame it in that way would be to get to the actual heart of the issue, and that would be too much. Instead, the door is left ambiguously (and conveniently) open to anything under the broad umbrella of “government inefficiency” or “democratic investment.” Notably, “DOGE” appears not once in the bulletin’s event recap. (Source: Ibid.)
Sounds remarkably similar to the never ending "Synod on Synodality" in (my) Catholic Church.
Harvard is chock full of meandering verbosity with little meaning.
Donald Rumsfeld once said, "Some people come to Washington to BE SOMEBODY. Others come to DO SOMETHING."
The corollary to that truism is this, "Still others come to Washington to HEAR THEMSELVES TALK."
Perhaps that is the true mission of Intellectual Vitality at Harvard?