Persistence and grit define first-generation, low-income students, even as we hide behind a facade of easy success. Harvard is incredibly diverse, both in privilege and lived experience, and we deserve an institution that is more responsive to our concerns and the unique challenges we face.
Though they are in competition with each other for student and public support, Harvard student campaign subgroups are united in their collective goal of encouraging and deepening youth civic engagement.
Harvard has deliberately kept its students and the greater university community in the dark by obscuring the processes behind its investment and shareholder decision-making — obscuring, even, how the members of the committees that make such decisions are selected. Without any meaningful answers from the administration, these practices suggest a concerted effort to evade public accountability.
As the generation of individuals inspired into service by Kennedy retires, a new wave of public servants must take up the mantle with innovative ideas that impact their communities.
For the rest of your life, people will ask: What was your time at Harvard like? Now is the time to pay attention. Better yet, now is the time to speak up.
Ultimately, the question of the lack of educational diversity in Supreme Court justices is not just about how Harvard and Yale affected future justices while in law school, but also where they have taken, and how they have shaped, their students.
Instead of attaching blame to one group or another, students can do more to achieve change by working together to reform Harvard’s ineffective systems for listening to student perspectives.
