Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government emeritus at Harvard and the author of many distinguished books, including this year’s The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, published by Harvard University Press. Not published by Harvard University Press is Professor Mansfield’s Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell On Deaf Ears, forthcoming from Encounter Books on May 12.
I go back with Professor Mansfield to his first book, Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (1965), which I read as an undergraduate. Intelligent readers would not want to miss his book Manliness (2008). It is something of a liberal education all by itself.
Yesterday the New York Post published Professor Mansfield’s column “I was one of a few conservative professors at Harvard — here’s where the school went wrong.” I find his conclusion “that the universities’ game of ignoring the other side is over” a tad overoptimistic, but Professor Mansfield writes from his own experience and should be heard out in any event. He writes:
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Harvard had long since lost its independence by allowing one party on the left to dominate all its parts and every activity, including science. Its vocabulary was woke, its legacy was said to be slavery, its honors delivered to liberals, its attention given to affirmative action in admissions and hiring. In this deliberate but often concealed movement, black leaders were held up for public honors but the real gainers were feminist women. These women (and their male collaborators) made sure that no conservatives, especially no women conservatives, would receive the favor or justice they deserved.Harvard had long since lost its independence by allowing one party on the left to dominate all its parts and every activity, including science. Its vocabulary was woke, its legacy was said to be slavery, its honors delivered to liberals, its attention given to affirmative action in admissions and hiring. In this deliberate but often concealed movement, black leaders were held up for public honors but the real gainers were feminist women. These women (and their male collaborators) made sure that no conservatives, especially no women conservatives, would receive the favor or justice they deserved.
I know something of this ugly development because I lived through it. I am a retired professor, a conservative Republican, who taught at Harvard for 61 years. With routine lack of success I opposed it with sweet reason, the only weapon I had. I started out with a few companions, but they were not replaced when they left or died. I was pretty much by myself and gained a certain notoriety that was scant reward for my efforts. I was almost never invited to speak publicly for “the other side.” In private meetings I was heard, but not listened to.
There were two “lost causes” for the conservative side that were my specialty: affirmative action and grade inflation. Strangely, with a kind of poetic justice, these two questions are now suddenly lost causes for liberals. My retirement, not my speeches, apparently did the trick.
Affirmative action was never popular. By effectively excluding white males, it violated the basic rule your mama teaches that two wrongs don’t make a right. It was originally said to be temporary because those it benefited would catch up and become equal. But when that did not happen, it had to substitute “equity” for equality, and make affirmative action permanent.
And to cover over this move, professors entered the sensitive practice of grading and created a false equality by giving everyone an A. Grade inflation was the necessary companion of affirmative action.
Yet, despite having almost won these causes, I would like people to know what I said with my conservative reasoning. It’s partly “I told you so,” always the comeback for advice not taken.
But it’s also to show that conservative thoughts and policies were available and usable earlier, as they are now seen to be.
Read the whole thing here.
