The Harvard Independent is a weekly newspaper produced by undergraduate students at Harvard University. It is one of many hard-news media outlets on the Harvard undergraduate campus.
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The Independent was founded in 1969 by students and alumni who felt the campus needed an alternative to The Harvard Crimson. The Crimson at the time reflected the left-wing turn of student organizations throughout the nation in the 1960s, and the founders of the Independent felt politically alienated from Crimson editors.
As the decades passed, the weekly newspaper, released every Thursday and distributed both on the Internet and to Harvard College student dormitories, the format morphed to that of an alternative weekly rather than a standard newspaper, with illustrated covers and four main sections: News, Sports, Arts, and the Forum (Op-Ed) section. In addition, the Independent also has several themed issues each year, including the annual The Game issue for the Harvard-Yale game, the literary issue, and the sex issue, featuring a Harvard-wide anonymous survey on sexual practices and opinions.
The Independent no longer has any political affiliation.
In 2006, the Independent was the first to report that Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan's highly-publicized debut young adult novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life contained "imagery, sentence structure, and paragraph organization" which was "strikingly similar" to material in Tanuja Desai Hidier's 2002 novel Born Confused.[1] Portions of Viswanathan's novel had previously been alleged to have been plagiarized from several other sources.[2][3][4]