Neither student culture nor university policies have been reformed enough to justify increased optimism for Harvard’s future.

E arlier this month, the Harvard Crimson released data indicating that Harvard received $151 million less in donations in fiscal year 2024 than in the previous year, making it the university’s worst year for donations since 2015. Gifts to the endowment, which support programs over time, as opposed to “current-use gifts” for immediate expenditures, dropped even more severely. It’s no wonder why — as the Crimson noted, several prominent donors (and scores of smaller ones) paused their giving in response to the university’s fumbling attempt to respond to antisemitic student and faculty protests.

According to President Alan Garber, the university expects donations to improve in the coming year; only time will tell whether this is wishful thinking. Certainly, things are calmer in Cambridge this year than they were last spring, and this may be enough for our donors. But it shouldn’t be. Neither student culture nor university policies have been reformed enough to justify increased optimism for Harvard’s future.

First, credit where it’s due: In late May, Garber announced in an email to the student body that the university would no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” This was, I think, a sincere attempt to make the university friendlier to those who do not share today’s orthodoxies, after a number of statements on issues from affirmative action to the death of George Floyd had irritated those who wanted the university to keep away from partisan politics.

Institutional neutrality is a second-best measure, of course; a university restored to its original mission of “Veritas, Christo, et Ecclesiae” and aware of its duties as one of America’s foremost institutions would naturally have institutional positions on any number of issues and encourage its students to act accordingly. But that university isn’t coming back soon, so we ought to be glad for this change.

Of course, while the policy will be a useful tool for administrators seeking an easy reason to avoid giving in to pro-Palestine protesters — and I will be glad to be spared some paternalistic if well-meaning emails declaring the university’s position on issues that have little to do with Harvard — institutional non-neutrality was never the main problem. With or without the policy, it is not difficult to imagine what the opinion of Harvard’s top brass on almost any relevant social issue is. What donors instead ought to pay attention to — what worries students like myself — is how Harvard governs student life.

Our free-speech policies are about as easy to untangle as the Gordian knot. Take, for instance, the regulations governing student-sponsored speaker events. Organizations wishing to partner with outside groups to host events (for instance, by working with groups such as Young Americans for Freedom to cover fees for high-profile guests) are extremely limited in their ability to do so. Additional restrictions, which limit our ability to share those events with broader audiences, are laid on groups wishing to allow outside reporters or to allow photography and video at their events. Complying with all of the college’s various policies is so onerous that the Salient, a student-run paper of which I am a board member, rents office and event space off-campus rather than relying on university facilities.

Organizations at the college that host potentially controversial speakers are also required to open their events by reading a statement informing protesters that they will be allowed to disrupt an event for ten minutes before they will be removed. While orderly protests outside of events should be allowed, this requirement allows hecklers the opportunity to seriously disrupt speakers they dislike. Additionally, the statement says nothing to disallow multiple disruptions to the same event by nominally separate groups of activists.

When those protests would embarrass the university, however, the same rules don’t apply. Earlier this month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (disclaimer: I interned for the committee last summer) released a group of documents relating to a protest last year at the Kennedy School, where Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., was interrupted by anti-CCP students. The committee began investigating the incident because one of the protesters, Cosette Wu, a junior at the time, was manhandled and removed from the event in under a minute.

Part of the difference in treatment was because Xie was speaking at the Kennedy School rather than the college. Each school within the university has some freedom to set its own policies. But that’s no excuse, especially because the person who removed the protester was a graduate student who was not authorized to provide security for the event. Despite that, rather than punishing him and apologizing to Wu, the university did the opposite.

The double standards are obvious. If a conservative student were to assault a protester at a Salient event, I guarantee that no university dean would “decide not to impose any sanctions” or say that such an “action is understandable.” The student would be punished. Equally absurd is the idea that Wu’s actions were a more severe violation of university policy than were those of the dozens of encampment participants who escaped being put on probation last spring.

It’s no wonder that for two years running we’ve been ranked last in the College Free Speech Rankings compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It can be difficult to sort through the competing interests implicated by student speech and protest, but time and again, Harvard has failed to handle these judgment calls well. The unfortunate conclusion is that many administrators at my alma mater seem to be more concerned about protecting Harvard’s image by keeping her out of the news than about maintaining thoughtful, clear, and evenly applied standards to shape difficult conversations on campus.

Whatever they might be telling donors, I have little reason to believe that this basic fact has changed. Maybe they’ll learn from the “intellectual vitality” initiative initiated by Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, and start treating students like adults again. Until then, however, Harvard’s donors ought to keep up the pressure.