Around a dozen students were already seated by the time I made it over to the grassy clearing in Harvard Yard. Everyone had radically different postures toward the issues at hand—the pro-Palestinian encampment, Harvard’s response to it, and the war in the Middle East. In mid-April, a friend of mine posted a panoramic video of a quiet Harvard Yard on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. One of the courses I most cherished at Harvard was a graduate seminar on higher education and the law. To me, these words pale in the face of unobserved yet dignified conversations like the one I shared during finals week.