Dark Academia, Reconsidered

Underneath the tweed and ivy, what else remains?

Before HBS, I existed in sleek west coast tech cities humming with technology and geodesic daydreams, where one can curate a soul the way one could curate a digital gallery. Arriving at Harvard to symmetrical, ivy-covered brick buildings constructed in the 1700s, it was hard not to romanticize and aestheticize what feels like a different world.

In this new (old) world, it is easy to arrive as a cliché archetype: the influencer with the leather Moleskin, for whom books are used less for reading and more as props for performing intellectual glamour. Influencers do not read to commune, to challenge, to be unmade. They read to be photographed, to masquerade a critique they lifted from ChatGPT as their own. This is Dark Academia stripped of its heart. It's the aestheticization of the ivory tower without any willingness to climb its treacherous, rotting stairwell.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History serves as the foundation for academic aestheticization without heart. Tartt seduces us and Richard Papen with the dizzying perfume of Hampden College— twilight Greek seminars, the heady romance of exclusivity, the sharp cut of a tweed blazer, and ever-so-elegant despair. Yet just as we settle into this romance, Tartt deliberately pulls it apart, exposing both the literal and figurative corpse at the heart of her idyllic world. Tartt reveals that nihilism masquerades as philosophy and privilege acts as a moral solvent. The “institution” and everything it represents facilitates the students’ downfall with cultivated apathy. Although many online communities view The Secret History as a dark academia how-to-guide, it actually represents the tragedy of what happens when the library becomes a backdrop, and the pursuit of beauty severs you from basic humanity.

Academia’s gilded carcass is critiqued in other contemporary literature as well. R.F. Kuang’s Babel argues that the very pinnacles of Western intellectualism are not merely complicit in empire and colonialism but serve as its primary engine. The beauty of language and the exquisite pain of etymology are all tools to extract and oppress. Similarly, Mona Awad’s Bunny plunges us into the pastel-colored, cult-like horror of a prestigious MFA program, where the desire for belonging and creative validation curdles into a deranged collective aesthetic. The “Bunnies” consume art and one another in a feedback loop of empty, sugary phrases, exposing the institution not as a crucible of genius but as a factory for parasitic, groupthink monstrosities.

In Lila Shapiro’s Vulture article “Gluttons for Punishment,” Penn professor Justin McDaniel outlines his infamous “monk class,” an experiment intended to restore students’ capacity for sustained reading through extreme disciplinary control. To that end, the course “dictates how these students dress and what they eat, forbids them from caffeine or alcohol . . . [and] bans the use of all technology besides electric lights and most social contact outside classroom hours, including phone calls home and sex” (Shapiro). The opinion is split over McDaniel’s methods—some insisting it’s what we need in the age of brain rot and TikTok algorithms to achieve critical thought, while others argue that it’s a parodic, institutionally-sanctioned cult bound to end in the tragedy depicted by its fictional counterparts.

Despite these criticisms, ignoring the value academic institutions offer is also deeply flawed. Tara Westover’s memoir Educated provides the starkest testimony. Here, the university is not aesthetically curated; it is a terrifying and exhilarating escape to a better life after being isolated and deprived of an education in rural Idaho. Westover’s struggle is not to adopt the aesthetic of a scholar. The value of the institution, for Westover, is its capacity to arm her with the knowledge and tools to deconstruct and reconstruct her world. To dismiss the academy entirely as a nest of murderers, colonizers, and Bunnies is to commit a profound act of intellectual poverty, to relinquish the very tools—critical thinking, historical analysis, philosophical debate—that allow us to critique it. Conversely, to simply play dress-up in its aesthetic is to become a hollow curator of a museum one does not understand.

A classmate described Harvard Business School as light academia. The gothic gloom of dark academia is absent—the vast, celestial optimism of Klarman Hall’s glass-and-steel atrium saw to that. Still, some kind of academic aesthetic persists, albeit a more corporate, clean-lined iteration. One could easily play the part of the protagonist in a prestige narrative, where the case method is a stage and the network a plot device, not yet compelled to read its troubling chapters on power and consequence.

To me, the true value of HBS, or of any rigorous institution, lies in the unsettling friction of collective human perspective. Here, the classmate—whether a physician, musician, veteran, banker, or engineer—is not a supporting character in a private narrative of intellectual superiority, but a co-author of understanding. Understanding compels me to dismantle my own cultural and intellectual assumptions, to recognize the medium in which I have been swimming. Learning ceases to be an act of aesthetic accumulation and becomes instead a fluid, analytical collaboration forged in the heat of difference.

Perhaps, the true intellectual project is not the rejection of academic aestheticization, but its reckoning. It is a conscious molt. We must shed the institution’s toxic nostalgias, its inherited hierarchies, and its devotion to style over justice—fallacies exposed by Tartt, Kuang, and Awad. What remains after that shedding is not emptiness. We can still love the ivory tower, but only if we are willing to study its rotting staircase in addition to its beauty, accepting that real scholarship is less about atmosphere than about knowledge and connection.

Ruby Liu (MBA ‘27) has lived in every region of the US, but says that she’s from Ohio and Texas. She graduated from UT Austin with a bachelors and masters degree in Accounting. Prior to HBS, she worked with several startups, nonprofits, and at Deloitte. Her writing has been featured in several literary journals including BarBar Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Juhea Kim’s now discontinued Peaceful Dumpling. Outside of work, Ruby enjoys reviewing books on instagram (@rubyrecreads), nature walks, and fun earrings.