Will Sutton

Will M. Sutton ’23 wants to be a history teacher. This is not hard to picture. I met him twice for dinner, and both times he came wearing flannels and tough boots, carrying an air of burly wholesomeness and a do-good spirit that reminded me of my own high school history teacher.

At Harvard, Sutton’s intended path to the classroom — rather than a stint at law school or a gig at a consulting firm — is unusual. There are those who push him to try his hand at something — anything — else. “I had a professor who I told I was interested in teaching, and they said, ‘There’s a lot of ways to carry on that passion. You can be a teacher in the boardroom, for example.’”

Friends “who know me tend to get it,” he says; they recognize a restless altruism. The History concentrator says teaching satisfies his three criteria for a future career: “that [it] would make me happy, be sustainable, and make the world a better place, in some small way.”

But education is only one of many avenues through which Sutton has tried to live by these ideals. His dedication to bettering the world around him and creating community for his peers led Sutton to campus activism, community jogging, and a seat on the Lowell House Committee.

He’s spearheaded undergraduate efforts to advocate on behalf of the Harvard employee unions and pushed reforms to dismantle rape culture on campus. “I’m always picking fights with the administration; it’s like my whole job,” he jokes. “And it’s well-documented in the pages of The Crimson.”

Sutton spent much of this fall taping up flyers and tabling to garner student support for hot breakfast to be reinstated at all campus dining halls — a collaborative effort between the University’s dining hall workers’ union, UNITE HERE Local 26, and the Student Labor Action Movement. The petition collected over 2,000 student signatures, and the Harvard Undergraduate Association expressed its support in its November email to students.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sutton and members of Our Harvard Can Do Better, a coalition of students organizing to end campus rape culture, met with administrators to discuss an amnesty policy for students living on campus who came forward with a complaint of sexual violence during lockdown restrictions.

Though the administration eventually added the amendment after SLAM rallied public pressure, Sutton says that in initial meetings, the administrators “were not really budging, and they were giving us the runaround.” In these instances, Sutton, who otherwise admits he’s a strange face in the rape culture conversation, says he’s noticed that “I can be taken more seriously by male administrators, so I’m