From the Editor’s Desk

This year marks the two hundred and fiftieth of the American experiment. It also marks the passing of the baton on to the ninetieth generation of this publication’s leadership. Holding it, we reckon with time - as do the institutions where longevity is both asset and liability.

The Harbus has long printed bound collections of every issue published during the school year. Our little office under Gallatin Hall, if you ever stop by and visit, has a shelf of them going back to the years following the Second World War. Their yellowed pages feature everything from coverage of Holidazzles and recruiting announcements to full-page ads on the American Express Gold Card.

Time has not been kind, in some ways. 1999 stood as the high-water mark of this newspaper, if we measure it by page and ad count. That year’s bound issue weighed in at over 1000 pages. Over the last two decades, they have thinned to 200. The internet has claimed, in a story familiar to any newspaper, what were once our pillars. 12twenty and private listservs have taken over our monopoly on recruiting notices; social media and messaging apps, the lively minutiae of campus life. Other campus papers have not survived the onslaught. Stanford GSB’s The Reporter, for example, shuttered by 2015 after over half a century in operation. The information age has disaggregated much of our business model. Its disruption has slowed our cadence from a weekly to a monthly news outlet.

This loss, however, has provided needed breathing room. Room to reflect, to prepare, to debate during the last schooling most of us will ever undertake. Room to encourage more thoughtful writing from a student body so well-trained in forming opinions yet so reticent to express them. The world that awaits us is one where business confronts from every direction questions we cannot defer. Yet after we leave Harvard’s grounds, we will lower our gaze toward the grind of execution that so fully characterizes the corporate boardroom and the startup garage. Will we then wait to be hauled to a government hearing before tending to our beliefs?

For better or worse, capital answers to the few. We, its future stewards, therefore bear the responsibility of self-interrogation - now, before day-to-day leadership consumes us. And, as investors in an education on America’s functional power at its oldest university, we would also do well to ask questions of this nation’s character on its 250th anniversary. There are few better places to do so than its first business school newspaper.

As Pranav and I assume the helm, we look forward to elevating not only pluralism on these topics and on the business school experience, but also a fuller and sharper dialogue. In a rebellion against the times, we also believe The Harbus must reclaim some, though not all, of the role it once played in HBS’s social fabric. These are not impossible tasks. The feedback we and our predecessors have received from peers and professors - that the HBS community turns to The Harbus as an outlet for genuine, reflective, and penetrating thought - shows the strength of our foundation.

In this issue, you will find a meditation on the meaning faith carries at HBS; a survey of who actually builds companies on campus; a defense of and call for renewed American patriotism; community profiles of our artists; gentle satire of our beloved professors; an archival feature on war and peace in Venezuela; and much more. Over the break, we have also launched initiatives that reflect changes to come: a new brand that elevates our legacy, an updated digital presence, and an archival column. We look forward to sharing more developments as the year progresses.

If there is any takeaway you wrestle from this column, it is this: be mindful of discomfort. Though we are a school of doers, we have our entire careers ahead of us to indulge in action. Know there is value now to be mined from the slow and difficult work of contemplation.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.