Dean Sean Kelly's message for the Fall Newsletter 2025

Dear Friends,

We’re entering the moment in the semester when encouragement matters most. At the start, energy and enthusiasm carry us forward like a powerful wave. Now, as the Fall begins in earnest, the current changes: midterms arrive, the weather cools, the light fades. This is when we must turn to one another to sustain the enthusiasm that came so easily at the start. I know we will all work together to this end. We must. For I believe we are engaged in one of the most important tasks our culture can imagine. 

Here at Harvard, our students, faculty, and staff aim together to lead a renaissance of the arts and humanities for the 21st century. This renaissance will bring together creative, critical, and scholarly pursuits to imagine and interpret the most fundamental questions of human existence. Among these are: What do we care about? Who have we become? Whom shall we have the courage to be? We must nurture these questions and hold them before us with the care they deserve. They stand at the core of humanistic inquiry. To engage them in an honest and authentic way, we must learn to be realistic about our present; we must look to our past with the ready affection of a critical eye; and we must do all this with the ambition to maintain hope for our future. 

Every moment is, in some sense, the culmination of history. Our moment feels, to many, as though something is coming to an end. But as Hannah Arendt reminds us, “every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.” The arts and humanities are the place where new beginnings are imagined. This year, we start out from two sustaining pillars. First, the Introductory Course Initiative invites students to discover themselves anew through languages, art, literature, philosophy, religion, and history. Second, the Public Culture Project puts humanists at the heart of crucial public conversations. I hope you will join us at our inaugural Public Culture event on October 1, where we will ask: How is digital technology shaping the human soul? 

These are just two of many initiatives we are pursuing, and I invite you to reach out if you would like to be involved. I hope you will, for we have so much work to do. The arts and humanities are the soul of higher education, and they must take their rightful position at the heart of the 21st century we imagine together. 

Let us begin!
Warm wishes,