Rara Avis: Professor Finds Harvard’s Faults

“Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University. Still teaching at the age of 94, he has just published a collection of essays , Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears . The book is a collection of his articles, speeches, and book reviews going as far back as 1975. He expounds on themes familiar to Martin Center readers, including grade inflation, the decline of merit and standards, the erosion of the curriculum, and the harms done by the obsession with affirmative action. Mansfield is proud to be conservative , one of an almost extinct breed at Harvard and other elite universities. He has been arguing several positions that I, at least, consider perfectly reasonable but are evidently regarded as impossibly reactionary by Mansfield’s colleagues: opposition to racial affirmative action (given the current intellectual climate, he supports affirmative action that favors conservative faculty), the importance of rigorous grading (given widespread grade inflation) and restoring of the Ivory Tower (no, Harvard is not just another consumer product). Apropos affirmative action, Mansfield provides this amusing anecdote: the case of an admitted student not known to be black whose financial aid was increased once he arrived and his race was revealed. (He refused the bonus. We don’t know if the DEI bureaucracy was embarrassed.) Grading by the teacher, rather than by an independent source, is fertile ground for moral hazard. --> One of Mansfield’s salient issues is grade inflation. The American grading system is a testament to the fundamental honesty that once characterized US society and surprised immigrants. But grading by the teacher , rather than by an independent source, is fertile ground for moral hazard. Grading your own students is basically marking your own homework. It is no accident that in most European academies, students taking high-stakes exams are anonymized, as are the graders of those exams. Yet teacher-grading worked fine for many years in the US, until in the last couple of decades it began to fail, and grade inflation became endemic. Mansfield observes that 85 percent graduated with honors at Harvard in 2025. The causes of grade inflation are these: Courses are now evaluated by students. At one time, those evaluations were unofficial, and Harvard’s “Confi Guide” circulated privately among students or advisers. In that form, it exerted little influence on teachers’ behavior. But then, in the late 1970s, these evaluations became official. Faculty, duped by rhetoric about the importance of “reliability” in evaluations, embarrassed to oppose any supposed improvement, and blissfully unaware of how the change would increase the power of administrators at their expense, went along. (Thankfully, a 2006 proposal for student votes on faculty tenure in Afro-American studies was defeated, but why was it even considered?) Once these evaluations began to play a role in salary and promotion, popularity became much more important than scholarly rigor. Easy grading makes for popularity, so grade inflation became the norm. Affirmative action introduced students who could not be seen to be discriminated against, yet, on average, were less capable than the majority (law professor Amy Wax got in trouble at Penn for pointing this out). Mansfield comments on the capability difference, which is not small. “For classes entering Harvard in 1991 and 1992, the difference in SAT scores between black people and white people was 95 points (out of a total of 1600)…” “Grade compression,” as it was euphemistically termed, solves that problem. All shall have prizes is now Harvard’s philosophy. Administrators either ignore the problem, says Mansfield, or, occasionally, wring their hands over the impossibility of correcting it. A mob of agitated students, peaceful or not, is an attempt to persuade not by reason but by emotion. --> Another of Harvard’s mistakes, according to Mansfield, is that it has allowed students to wield power through intimidation. A university is about facts and arguments. A mob of agitated students, peaceful or not, is an attempt to persuade not by reason but by emotion. “Those who want to express themselves by venting should do so in public spaces, not in the university,” writes Mansfield. Quite so. Demonstrations should not be allowed on a university campus. They are often defended by reference to “free expression” as equivalent to free speech. Mansfield is correct to separate the two: “free expression” is closer to theater than reason. Harvard’s administration particularly disgraced itself in its failure to handle the campus rampages of 2023, eventually costing President Claudine Gay her job, but the problem is much older. Mansfield also takes aim at Harvard’s curriculum. “Studies” programs such as Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, and the like began to form in the 1970s. Harvard was actually a laggard, eventually forming the Committee on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) well after many other schools had formed departments. “Studies” departments are usually activist cells with political aims rather than disinterested truth-seeking. --> “Studies” departments are usually activist cells with political aims rather than disinterested truth-seeking. Indeed, many feminist pronouncements explicitly deny the possibility of objective (male-defined?) truth. Mansfield comments on the Harvard Women’s Studies reading list: “no Plato, Aristophanes, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton. No scientific studies…” In an aside, he points out that “‘The ‘Me Too’ movement was able to identify the sexual aggression of men but had nothing to say about seduction by women.” Harvard, of course, had to take the side of the supposedly oppressed group—women. The numerous “Studies” programs at Harvard (and elsewhere) are byproducts of the increasing fissiparousness of social science and humanities. Given the overarching importance given to research, fueled by the money to be made for the university (not so much by the individual researcher), most science-related faculty would prefer not to teach undergraduates at all, but if they must, they prefer to teach their specialties. Many historians, for example, would prefer to teach Gen-Ed courses like “Americans as Occupiers and Nation-Builders” or “Asian Americans as an American Paradox” than, say, “British-American history from 1066 to 1900.” That, Mansfield laments, has led to the degradation of general education. Harvey Mansfield’s tenure protected him from the kind of adverse consequences that might have befallen an equally outspoken untenured person. --> Mansfield is also critical of Harvard’s groveling about slavery. Even though Memorial Hall on campus was built to honor Harvard alumni who died fighting for the Union during the Civil War, current Harvard leaders feel the need for expensive and pointless virtue signaling, claiming that Harvard “has a legacy of slavery.” In 2022, Harvard decided to spend $100 million from its $53.2 billion endowment on a new project. President Lawrence Bacow celebrated the effort with a letter to the Harvard community on April 26, 2022, announcing Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery , a 132-page report describing Harvard’s racial history and explaining how the money will be spent. All that expenditure will not make Harvard “more welcoming” than in the past, but will allow the administrators to crow about their commitment to “social justice.” Harvey Mansfield’s tenure protected him from the kind of adverse consequences that might have befallen an equally outspoken untenured person. But his speeches to the faculty had little or no effect. Indeed, in some cases, they evidently aroused laughter. Occasionally, Mansfield’s remark was a joke, as when he suggested that “all shall have prizes” be applied to sports. But sometimes it was not, as when he pointed to three mediocre women politicians who had been awarded an honorary degree, while undoubtedly outstanding Margaret Thatcher was not. Harvey Mansfield’s failure to change Harvard’s weak, woke ways is surely more a comment on Harvard than on him. In the unlikely event that future Harvard leaders should decide that the school needs a course correction, this book will be waiting for them. John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology Emeritus at Duke University. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in January 2021 as a commentator on the current problems of science. His book Science in an Age of Unreason (Regnery) came out in 2022, and Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work (Taylor and Francis, 2nd Edition) came out in 2024. The post <i>Rara Avis</i>: Professor Finds Harvard’s Faults appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal .

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