Mansfield’s Insufficient Protest

“In lecture Thursday morning, Mansfield announced he will distribute two sets of grades to his students: an initial grade he thinks they deserve, and then a second grade—the one that will go on their transcript—which will be ‘based on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.’” Harvard Crimson, February 5, 2001 

As we know, book reviews have become inflated and today amount to reciprocal flattery in anticipation. It seems only fitting, then, to give two reviews of Harvey Mansfield’s latest book, one conventional and one real. 

My conventional review proceeds thus. 

Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard until his retirement in 2023, was for over sixty years a deeply serious educator, a paradigm of a scholar, and a marvelous and loyal mentor to graduate students. This collection, consisting mainly of his interventions at faculty meetings and a series of essays written for the Crimson in 2025, documents how he opposed grade inflation with wry humor and good sense during almost his entire career.  

As early as 1975 he is asking President Derek Bok why, among various efforts of reform of undergraduate education, no task force had been appointed to investigate grade inflation, given that in the previous year 85 percent of the class had been graduated cum laude: “the shape of the curve in honors had ceased to be that of a bell and had come to resemble a swelled head.” Mansfield intervenes on the topic again in 1994, 1998, and 2000, as the percentage of A grades keeps rising. The administration and his colleagues do nothing. 

Eventually, the problem became so bad—60 percent of students were receiving A grades, while the 25^th percentile student attained a cumulative GPA of 3.66—that in May of this year, the Harvard faculty voted to cap straight As at 20 percent, with instructors allowed an additional four discretionary As in a course.   

However, the faculty set no overall target, and the average course at Harvard has only 12 students.  

Therefore, an instructor in an average course can fully comply with this “cap” while assigning straight As to 7 students, or 58%. So even if this minimal “cap” does not eventually bulge and burst from student pressure, the problem is hardly solved. It would be a bit premature, then, for Mansfield to claim vindication. 

Also included in the collection are various essays and interventions by Mansfield against affirmative action (excluded now by Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the banishment of ROTC, special-interest faculties such as “Women’s Studies,” the blindness of the faculty to the evils of communism, and commencement exercises as barely disguised Democratic party rallies. 

That last sentence serves as a catalog of the other ways in which Harvard “went wrong.” But when and why did it go wrong? As Mansfield tells the story, during the Vietnam War, the administration consistently took the side of the conservative faculty against the student “rebellion.” However,  

in 1973, to rebuild the mutual respect necessary to the well-being of a university, President Bok appointed [as Dean of Arts and Science] a man known to be of neither side [Henry Rosovsky]. This meant that he had granted a power of veto to the left, that Harvard was therefore taking a step to the left, and that it would no longer oppose the sixties rebellion in principle.  

Ever since then, the administration and faculty have kept advancing the agenda of the “rebellion.” 

Readers deeply concerned about the fate of the American university can be grateful that this excellent book serves as an enduring record of the courage of a single scholar of integrity, who stood up and spoke out in favor of good sense.  

Grade: A. 

Thus ends my conventional review, and my real review proceeds as follows. 

To correspond to the expression “here’s where you went wrong,” one must give a tally of what is wrong; a time, incident, or decision that marks a break; and an explanation of the bad turn. Moreover, we hardly say that institutions “went wrong” except for some major failure, leading to dissolution or bankruptcy, as in “where Enron went wrong” or “where Boeing went wrong.” 

Despite the title of this collection, it is not clear that Mansfield believes Harvard went wrong. 

Why? Because he repeatedly insists that Harvard is “the most prestigious university in America, perhaps the world” and “America’s leading university today”. The world’s leading orchestra obviously did not go wrong, nor did the world’s leading museum, nor did the world’s leading soccer team. 

Also, because Mansfield stayed there for over 70 years, how “wrong” a turn could it have taken? Mansfield’s complaints about Harvard may be summed up at a high level as follows: its grades are fraudulent, and it fails at quality control. As to the first, Mansfield kept two sets of books: if that’s not complicity in a fraud, then it’s a jest.   

As for quality control, what would we say if Boeing, over the course of fifty years, kept on making faulty airplanes, and there was a single engineer who repeatedly stood up and documented before his colleagues their serious quality control errors, and these colleagues ignored him, and yet this engineer stayed with the firm? If we were convinced of this man’s integrity, we would have to conclude his criticisms were not serious. 

Some Harvard professors have left, as John Wild did in 1961, in protest against Harvard’s narrow analytic philosophy department, and Henry David Aiken in 1965, because the university as a whole, he thought, had become utilitarian. And many professors at other institutions have voted with their feet since.     

Indeed, the greater structural difficulty with our prestigious but corrupt universities will not be addressed until scholars and scientists show students, by what they give up, that they prefer something else over prestige. 

One therefore worries that the book becomes an exercise in cultivated arrogance and nostalgia. Mansfield pines for “the old Harvard arrogance I rather liked, beginning from my first arrival as a freshman in 1949.” This was what he calls “Old Harvard,” marked by a “reasonable pride” that comes from “consciousness of merit.” “Old Harvard,” we are meant to believe, was perfectly fine. Mansfield had already resided in Old Harvard for twenty years when, according to his account, in the early 1970s it changed, becoming “New Harvard” through capitulation to the student rebellion. 

Almost his first experience of Old Harvard was taking “Nat. Sci. 4” with then-President James B. Conant. Let Conant stand for how things were not so fine with “Old Harvard.” Is Mansfield deliberately softening the record, or still seeing things from the point of view of a naïve freshman, when he writes of Conant merely that he “took a leading part in the direction of the Manhattan Project.” Conant, rather, a Harvard chemist who had overseen the production of poison gas during World War I, was among the two or three top directors of the Project—while continuing to serve as President of Harvard.  

From the minutes of the Project’s “Interim Committee,” tasked with advising Truman on how to use the bomb, we know that this Harvard President advocated using the bomb as soon as it was ready, without giving Japan any warning, and on some military installation “employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” In plain English, he wanted to exploit the principle of double effect to terrorize the Japanese into immediate surrender. Conant, too, saw to it that Harvard would award an honorary degree to J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947, and he personally read the citation: “Brilliant director of the scientists and engineers who made a bomb from nuclear fuels.” 

Could it possibly be that a university has been corrupted already when it styles itself as the thought leader for the “military industrial complex”? The suspicion is not raised by Mansfield. He describes Conant simply as a scientist who was “also involved with politics,” and who returned to Harvard “particularly concerned with the difficulty of conveying the abstruse precision of science to nonscientists.” Conant was “absorbed” in the question of whether “this” (i.e., destroying cities) was “a good thing for humanity.” 

In “Old Harvard,” as Mansfield glowingly recounts, Conant set down a wise plan of “General Education,” in which the core topic for undergraduate education was to be “the relation of science to nonscience.”  Under this plan, budding scientists would come to see that “the unscientific foundation of science leaves science far short of wisdom,” while “it is the job of the humanities to make nonscience into something positive that could be called human in the best sense.” Mansfield laments the loss of this vision. Yet it’s obvious that questions of the relationship of the humanities to the sciences have nothing to do with the disturbing question of the subordination of the university to political or wartime goals.  

Mansfield then scratches his head in puzzlement that, almost immediately, Conant’s own mode of teaching the “foundations of science” produced a scholar whose work subverted the whole project—Thomas Kuhn, who “wrote the landmark postmodern criticism of science,” which also reduced the humanities to “helpless relativism.”  

Conant’s Harvard seems an inevitable development of the new vision of a secular university, grounded in mathematical science rather than classical education, which was pioneered by his predecessor, Charles Eliot, in 1869. As regards Harvard's path since, a recitation of the Faust story would reveal far more about where it “went wrong” than Mansfield’s cabined narrative about Henry Rosovsky.   

Later in the book, Mansfield reveals that he thinks Harvard has “gone wrong” in far more ways than grade inflation and affirmative action. He describes the institution as fundamentally fraudulent.  

Of his colleagues, he says, “I think I have shown that they have yielded essential ground that a university must occupy if it wants to remain itself: the possibility of devotion to truth.” In their avoidance of courses on greats like Shakespeare or Homer, they fail “on principle but also for their convenience to consider what is good for students.”  

As for Harvard students, “Their greater merit does not induce them to work harder; it only enables them to be more opportunistic.”  

The administrators at Harvard have fully given themselves over to the “evil” of “politicization, an ugly word for deliberate, organized bias.” They “aggressively turn every important question of education—student life, curriculum, and especially faculty appointments—into opportunities for political gain.” Harvard is governed by people who think that “Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and other such elements in our ‘common learning’ were the consequence of narrow class privilege,” favored merely by subjective, value-laden preferences. 

It’s hard to believe that anyone who thinks all these things can really believe that the bad New Harvard came from the good Old Harvard because of the selection of a Dean. The effect cannot be greater than the cause.   

Mansfield, in other places, has deep things to say about liberalism’s being at risk of declining into nihilism. I expected him to say something along these lines about the university itself, in the manner of John Henry Newman, Allan Bloom, or even Joseph Ratzinger, when he once addressed young university professors in Madrid:  

We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the University, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity. 

Instead, we get a laundry list and a simplistic explanation in what looks like a self-congratulatory project.  

Mansfield, it seems, has not thought through sufficiently, or at least does not say, how Harvard’s failings are not episodic but systematic and rooted in a view of the human person that he himself has consistently tried to resist, one fears, without rejecting it. 

One struggles to say it is even a satisfactory work for him. 

Grade: C-. 

Michael Pakaluk received his A.B. in Philosophy from Harvard College and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he wrote his dissertation under John Rawls. An Aristotle scholar, he is Ordinary Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.