Dear Harvard College Students, 

Happy New Year, and welcome to the Spring 2025 semester. I hope your break was filled with a combination of replenishment of energy and joy—the kind of joy that lingers, even against New England's bracing winds. During these freezing days I find myself singing Noah Kahan: Forgive my northern attitude, oh, I was raised out in the cold. 

As I begin my final semester as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College, I find myself looking both forward and back. The spring semester can be bittersweet for those preparing to graduate in May: the last lap of a four year race, filled with friendships and moments that have shaped the person you are and becoming. For others, the semester marks another chapter in an unfolding journey—whether you're a first-year student looking toward Housing Day, a sophomore solidifying your path, or a junior already glancing toward senior year. 

Wherever you are in your Harvard journey, I hope you will see the semester ahead as an opportunity to branch out—to encounter and grapple with new ideas, to seek out people whose perspectives unsettle you and engage with them, and to turn towards uncertainty. At its core, a liberal arts and sciences education is a never-ending conversation between what we know and what we don't know. It requires humility and the confidence to say, "I don't know." It’s not easy to confront ideas that we disagree with or to interrogate our beliefs, but challenging conversations and genuine exploration are central to a Harvard education. One of the aspects of my role as dean that I will miss the most is the chance to engage with so many of you about your ideas and beliefs. I encourage you to visit the Intellectual Vitality website to explore the resources and opportunities available to support you in making the most of the opportunities you have here to learn from each other. 

In the spirit of vital and open discourse on campus, I also want to share a small but meaningful initiative: this semester we are reinstalling door boxes across the residential Houses. These boxes, a staple in the first-year dorms and historically present in the Houses, allow for the distribution of printed materials—campus publications, event flyers, and more. During renovations, they were removed, thereby limiting access to student-driven content. Restoring them is a way of honoring the labor and creativity of our students while fostering the exchange of ideas. 

I get it is a bit analog in a digital world. But there is a power in materiality-- words on paper that resists the pull of our digital lives, dominated as they are by algorithms that cater to our preferences and feed our certainties. The printed word—tangible and deliberate—offers something precious: the chance for serendipity. A chance encounter with a sentence or idea can spark a question you didn't know you had or send you down a path you hadn't considered. 

At Harvard, the written word has long been a tool for change, for movement, for dialogue. Our campus publications and organizations are part of this tradition, amplifying voices and giving shape to our intellectual community. I may not always agree with what is written, but that is precisely the point. Reading perspectives that challenge me pushes me to seek out more, think harder, pop the epistemic bubble, and sharpen my understanding. I hope you will take advantage of the opportunities provided by these publications to engage outside the algorithm and to listen to the many voices that make up this community. 

As we step into this new semester, I hope you’ll share your own thoughts about how we can continue to cultivate an environment where ideas flourish, collide, and grow. If you have suggestions, please bring them to the Intellectual Vitality team—their work is as much yours as ours. 

Wishing you a semester of discovery and connection. 

Semper Veritas, 

Rakesh 

Rakesh Khurana 
Danoff Dean of Harvard College