Cross the Bridge

Aerial view of campus during the Dedication ceremonies on June 4, 1927, courtesy of Baker Library Historical Collections

Our education is incomplete on this side of the river.

On June 4, 1927, Dean Wallace B. Donham addressed 4,000 people on the lawns of Baker Library. They were gathered for the Dedication ceremony of HBS’s new campus in Allston. Intriguingly, Donham’s remarks focused less on the buildings he had raised and more on the ethics of the future managers he was stewarding. He said, “the task of developing the … group consciousness and sense of responsibility in the new profession is not an easy one.” 

When I arrived at Baker Lawn a century later, I was flummoxed to find a business school that appeared untethered from its parent university and geographical surroundings. HBS is physically, culturally, and, arguably, ethically a world away from the rest of Harvard University. The lack of osmosis across the river hurts students on both banks, depriving us of contrasting world views (and technical co-founders) that can help us interrogate our assumptions and develop more robust convictions.

HBS was founded in 1908 alongside the nascent professionalization of commerce into the managerial class. The campus was housed in Harvard Yard until a 1924 campaign raised $100 million in today’s dollars and gave the school a 40-acre home in Allston. Donham’s ambitions permanently placed the Charles River between HBS and Harvard’s historic center.

During my first-year as an RC, my conception of Allston started at Continuum and ended at Mellon Hall. As a second-year EC student, the usual two-dimensional tetris of picking classes was replaced by three-dimensional chess since the HBS timetable is entirely incompatible with the rest of Harvard. This geographic and administrative isolation was compounded by a cultural one: students who have no trouble crossing the Atlantic Ocean for a weekend at Oktoberfest appeared overwhelmed with inertia by the prospect of crossing the river.

Harvard, perhaps fairly, has been accused of being an echo chamber. But when we are so self-absorbed in the HBS bubble, we miss dissonant tones that ring across the University. Our condescension makes it harder to cross this “psychological gulf,” described by Philip Delves Broughton (MBA ‘06) in his memoir: “HBS refers to the larger university as ‘across the river,’ as in ‘across the river, they wear tweed jackets, read Marx, and haven't a clue about how the world really works. Here at HBS we know better.”

This isolation, partly structurally imposed, partly wilfully accepted, makes us increasingly blind to received wisdom at HBS and less able to understand competing worldviews elsewhere within the University. 

I spent a year at HKS before starting my RC year. In the fall of 2023, my walks to class were punctuated by doxxing trucks rolling around Harvard Square, largely targeting undergraduates still in their teens. A year later in Aldrich, I crossed paths with billionaire donors who had vocally supported these trucks. In March of this year, a guest made light of deadly covert operations in an event hosted by an HBS club and moderated by an HBS professor. That April, a scheduled session on Lebanon in a core RC class was canceled with a day’s notice, little in the way of explanations, and minimal consternation on campus (including in this paper of record).

The Class of 2026 experienced HBS during the most challenging chapter for Harvard in recent history. Yet, I have been shocked to see how little we address the happenings as they unfold around us. Perhaps we’d be more indignant if we had interfaced with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, whose faculty leaders were dismissed. Or if we knew student organizers who have risked their graduations to stand up for their beliefs. If we had learned about the scale of ramifications at the medical school. 

Instead, we were ensconced away in our bubble. 

Graduating members of the Class of 2025 have described this phenomenon, saying: “we interpret distance as a virtue. Let the undergrads protest; we’re here to innovate, create value, and lead companies. We’ve been told … that speaking up comes with a cost … Over time, that instinct becomes ingrained, and silence turns into strategy.” This logic of insularity quickly reaches its limits. I was intrigued to see glimmers of a political consciousness in May as student visas came under attack. That students at the most elite institution in the world are not immune to the machinations of politics should tell us something. Our sense of exceptionalism, as individuals and as an institution, can only take us so far. 

As Harvard continues to fight legal battles, HBS students could do well to put in their chips with the University. Classes are one modality, but there are events, study groups, and friends to be made. We should acquaint ourselves with radically different ways of looking at the world. My most profound experiences in graduate school have arisen with people motivated by entirely different assumptions and goals: researchers who are world experts in exceedingly niche fields, secular socialist Divinity School students, and bureaucrats striving for institutional change that may be imperceptible to an outsider.

Donham had already recognized this a century ago when he said, “we need leadership in the direction of sound social progress exercised within business …The possession of material things must be subordinated to … one’s constructive relationship to the organized society of which he is a part.” 

Realizing his vision will require crossing the bridges he built. 

Surbhi Bharadwaj (MBA / MPA-ID ’26) grew up in Delhi. She studied economics and statistics at Yale and worked in consulting, tech, and international development. Her average coordinates during graduate school would place her in the middle of the Charles River.