As the Election Approaches, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana on How Harvard is Pushing Students to Vote
The Crimson asked Khurana about petitions calling for Harvard to designate Election Day as a holiday, and how voting dovetails with the responsibilities students have more broadly.
Photo by Amanda Y. Su
By Amanda Y. Su, Crimson Staff Writer
Four years ago, 47.9 percent of Harvard undergraduates voted in the presidential election.
That figure marked a jump from the 2012 cycle, during which 41.2 percent of students at the College. But administrators and students have spent much of the past several weeks aiming to increase participation come Nov. 3. Earlier this month, University President Lawrence S. Bacow sent a campus-wide email with a simple subject line: “Vote.”
Still, some students say Harvard can do more to encourage civic participation, circulating petitions calling for the University to designate Election Day a holiday.
The Crimson asked Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana about those petitions, and how voting dovetails with the responsibilities students have more broadly.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Harvard Crimson: How do you think voting and civic engagement factor into the Harvard College experience for undergraduates?
Rakesh Khurana: I think civic participation is critical to the mission of educating citizens and citizen-leaders for society. Wherever you're from, I think it's really important to engage civically in your economic, social, political, and cultural context. I think that's something that we hope for our students. It's one of the things that we really seek to identify in our undergraduate body and encourage. So I think that voting is a critical part of democracy. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires engagement.
I also know that there's widespread uncertainty and anxiety about the 2020 election season. A combination of a pandemic, the reckoning and calls for greater racial justice, the exacerbated inequalities, the economic disruption has all put us in a different mode. I also recognize that the election is consequential for the nation. It’s particularly consequential in even more intense ways for some members of our community because of many of the issues that literally would profoundly affect their lives, or not be supportive of their identities, or be incredibly damaging and even a tragedy for their families.
THC: What is Harvard doing to encourage students to engage civically?
The College is working in a variety of ways — and so is the University — to create a variety of spaces for people to think about the election, for different groups in our campus to meet to process beforehand. We're also mobilizing the intellectual resources of the institution for people who want to talk about some specific areas related to the election and what different outcomes mean. But we also are trying to make sure that we support our students, our staff, and our faculty so that they can know that they're not alone. We're trying to learn the lessons from the last election and also listen to the community about what their needs are.
THC: Students have been circulating this petition calling on Harvard to designate Election day a University holiday so that affiliates can take the day off to go vote and volunteer at polling locations. We were wondering if you had any thoughts on that proposition?
RK: As a social scientist, I think there's a lot of work that our society needs to do to make voting easier. My understanding from my colleagues who study comparative democracy is that the United States has a system that makes voting particularly challenging — It is done in the middle of the week, while in some nations, it's a holiday, that the way registration works and how our voting rolls are administered really is challenging. And also that there's evidence that there's bias in it. And so I think all of us have a responsibility, especially given COVID-19, given the high levels of participation, that we are expecting to be flexible, and understanding about what people are doing.
I think the good thing that we're seeing is that there's a lot of early voting happening. But I would encourage all of us to keep thinking about how we can be flexible and supportive during this time. I also believe the work that we're doing has never been more important. I think questions of truth, questions of expertise, questions of professional disinterestedness are critical for what we are deciding upon. And so for me, the teaching and the research that we do is actually part of the solution, not an impediment to the challenges that we face as a society.
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