Our campus abounds with invisible divisions. Harvard students are separated by socioeconomic, racial, and cultural differences that permeate all parts of our lives, from classrooms to dining halls. These divisions influence our academic, social, and even physical well-being.
Students stick to their own groups and coexist with those outside them, but many envision a campus where we shed our biases, transcend these boundaries, and learn from others with diverse — and sometimes incompatible — interests and lived experiences. It is through this process alone we can take full advantage of all that Harvard has to offer, as well as experience the personal and intellectual transformation that has long been endorsed as a foundation of the college experience.
Harvard College: History and Present Day
The College, established in 1636, is the oldest institution of its kind in the United States. In 1870, more than 200 years later after its founding, Richard T. Greener was the first Black student to graduate with a Harvard College degree. Another century later, in 1999, Harvard University and the Radcliffe College — the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College — officially merged.
Harvard’s age and history have fostered a university environment soaked in tradition and prestige. Harvard possesses a strong form of social desirability, for admission adheres to a paradigm of intellectual prowess and extraordinary achievement and is painted as overwhelmingly meritocratic. Viral videos of hardworking students from various walks of life gaining admission to Harvard are the 21st century American equivalent of Dickensian “rags to riches” tales.
The logic follows that the modern Harvard is not overtly discriminatory because it does not explicitly preclude students of color, first-generation, low-income students, and otherwise disadvantaged students from gaining admission. In fact, many critics of Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies — such as the Students for Fair Admissions, who sued Harvard in 2014 and advocate a “colorblind” approach to college admissions — believe the College unfairly favors Black and Hispanic applicants, discriminating against Asian and White applicants.
Cries for equal opportunity, however, often fail to account for the highly unequal starting points of different individuals, marked significantly by institutional disparities that prevent many students from competing with their more privileged counterparts. These disparities do not end after students gain admission to Harvard — students of minority religions, low-income backgrounds, and other underrepresented identities still face academic and social otherness in their college lives.
Conversations with Students
I spoke with two students, who shared their perspectives with respect to their personal ethnic and religious identities and also offered commentary on other divisions on campus.
Caroline Hao ’25: How do you feel socioeconomic, racial, and cultural differences influence students’ academic lives at Harvard?
Maryam Tourk ’25: It can be isolating to be a Muslim student at Harvard. I follow a halal diet, and a lot of my friends do too. The halal options in Annenberg aren’t as good as the normal food. So it’s just hard to eat, which is a basic part of existing here on campus. Our prayer space is in the basement. It’s kind of depressing to go to a basement to pray. Overall, it doesn’t feel like Harvard really tries to do a good job supporting Muslim students.
Another identity I hold is my ethnic identity. I’m Kashmiri, Egyptian, and white. Kashmir is a disputed territory between India and Pakistan. Their autonomy was stripped away, and now there’s a lot of conflict. As a Kashmiri, I can’t even find a lot of solidarity in South Asian groups, because my identity and experience are kind of invalidated.
I think these issues haven’t affected my academic wellbeing as much, but I’ll also say I intentionally chose spaces that I knew would be very supportive of me as a human being. And I had to be super vigilant about doing that. I know that that won’t always be the case, where I’m lucky enough to have those kinds of classes. And Muslim representation in faculty isn’t great. I’m taking a class with one of the only Muslim professors I can think of on campus. We don’t even have an ethnic studies department. It’s hard to learn about ethnicity as a whole. We’re at the best university in the world, and I have such limited access to things I’m interested in.
Anoushka Chander ’25: First of all, I’ve had a really wonderful experience. It’s just been a very different lifestyle than I’ve ever been used to. Getting used to it was definitely a shift.
I chose my classes very specifically. I knew exactly what I wanted to study, what I wanted to learn more about, and the places I’d feel most comfortable and played to my own strengths. I’ve noticed there are no TFs or faculty I have at the current moment who are South Asian or South Asian women. Also, allowing students to feel that if they want to study South Asian Studies or East Asian Studies, that it’s valid, and it’s not an unusual choice. Establishing that it’s a real academic pursuit is very important.
In my humanities class, when we had our first lecture on South Asian Hindu art, it was placed on the weekend of the three-day weekend. Only half the class showed up to the lecture on South Asian art, and it was a really unfortunate turnout for our professor. That’s just one of those things that’s, like, a bummer.
Students can feel tokenized during class. It’s more of a problem of not knowing how to interact with individual cultures and ethnic backgrounds in a very genuine way, just because not everyone has knowledge about every culture in the world. And you want all these people at the table, but if you’re only providing them with space when, for example, issues of enslavement come up, and you’re like, now let’s turn to the Black students in the class to speak, that’s not okay.
If you’re only talking about enslavement, or if you’re only talking about the Holocaust, you’re only talking about all these atrocities and not celebrating and uplifting those cultures as well and providing beauty and positivity, but instead assigning people horrors of the past, that’s also an issue because you have to see a cultural or racial or ethnic group as more than just one event in their history.
Hao: And how do you feel these differences might impact students’ social lives?
Tourk: Socially, it’s hard, because people tend to stick to who they know. People gravitate toward similar ethnic groups. Like I said, it’s a little isolating, not fitting cleanly into one or the other. A lot of the systems here at Harvard are so old and antiquated, like final clubs. You don’t see many people of color. As a person of color, I’d feel unsafe in those spaces, because it’s so tokenizing. Also, it’s representative of moving up in the system. So you can’t even place judgment on people who decide to enter into these spaces — they’re taking the agency and working against institutions that have been working against them for a really long time. But at the same time, I can’t imagine how alienating it can be as a person of color in those spaces. I’ve heard stories about that.
I’m a big believer in the power of dialogue in bringing about education, and so that being limited is something that’s so frustrating to me. Coming here, one of the biggest things I was excited about was the chance to be around all kinds of different people. Harvard even advertises itself as a hub for international students and people from all across the U.S. And that’s something that drew me here. But coming here and not really having those conversations because people stick to themselves is frustrating. I expected there to be a lot of dialogue around what makes us different and our experiences and how we can learn from each other. And I haven’t seen a lot of that, which is kind of sad, because we have so many opportunities to learn and grow from each other.
Chander: People dip their toe into attempting diversity, and I think most of it is probably pretty genuine. But it’s just not the right way to go about things, and I know there are students who feel tokenized. You can’t create a space and invite people in and then ask them to act in the way you think that their racial identifier should condition them to act, right? Like, the space has to be welcoming for them as an entire person, not for them as a trope of their racial identifier.
There are a lot of cultural celebrations. Dharma does some amazing events all the time. But I’ve noticed they’re very much student-run and student-organized rather than being highlighted and celebrated on the more administrative side of Harvard.
I went to a school in D.C. for high school. And the administration there was very much in coordination with celebrating Hindu holidays or Chinese New Year, different kinds of Asian cultural celebrations. Whereas here, I feel like it’s very student-run, independent of what the administration is even aware of. There are definitely other religious organizations on campus that have more structural and administrative support. I think that should just be afforded to everyone.
Hao: How do you grapple with these boundaries, and how might we overcome or redefine them — either on an institutional or cultural level?
Tourk: On a university-wide level, Harvard needs to do a better job of equally supporting different groups, because until they do that, I feel like different groups are going to stick to themselves and try to find solidarity within themselves. But if the university supported different groups on the same level, then we’d be able to get out of our bubbles and start meeting other people. I think that’s really important. It just goes back to the simple things like the food and prayer spaces, things like that.
As for dialogue, I think it’ll have to be a social and cultural initiative to seek other people out. I think that the university almost pits first-generation-low-income and wealthier students against each other in terms of institutional divides. When you see students benefiting from the university’s legacy-preference admissions and then see that FGLI students aren’t being supported the way they need, that naturally fosters a lot of tension between those groups. But then, you put it together in a social context, and there’s a lot of toxicity in those interactions that I think really drives people away from even trying to have dialogue with other groups.
Chander: Social media has allowed for more cultural sensitivity, especially coming into a place where people are from all around the world. I really feel like there’s been a collective agreement of the student body to respect everyone, and there are some outliers to that in terms of individual people who have held more biased views, but in general, the student body is very committed to uplifting each other and respecting differences.
We also don’t have a multicultural center. The public high school I would’ve gone to had I stayed living in California had a multicultural center, which was great. It’s also something other colleges I’ve toured have. I think that’s something that could create a safe space for racial, religious, and gender minorities. But I think having a space dedicated to education and upliftment is very important, rather than having someone be stuck in a basement.
Having a physical building that isn’t just a place to hold affinity group meetings, but where you go to celebrate all the different people at the school. I think having a space for international students, students of color, religious minority students to go to that has more aspects of their homes and their identities is important. Penn has a Multicultural Center, and a lot of other institutions have them, so we can do this.
Reflections
The privileges of wealth, of tradition, of history, and of Whiteness often come at the expense of perspective and empathy. Many students remain ignorant to the discrimination felt by their peers with different backgrounds, and the administration often neglects the needs of certain groups within their student body. Despite this, I am hopeful. I see the willingness for change growing in many pockets of our campus. As we imagine a better Harvard and aspire to achieve it, we can build a community that truly values and celebrates diversity.
Image by Somesh Kesarla Suresh is licensed under the Unsplash License.
