Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears, by Harvey Mansfield (Encounter, 144 pp., $24.99)
Even the best of us occasionally finds it hard to resist saying, “I told you so.” In his new book, Where Harvard Went Wrong, Harvey C. Mansfield says that his goal is not to claim vindication but to argue that conservative ideas deserve a more hospitable place in American universities. He has spent decades, though, standing athwart Harvard, yelling “Stop,” so one can detect a quiet note of satisfaction in the record he assembles.
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Mansfield, still intellectually active at 94, recently retired from Harvard after arriving as an undergraduate in 1949 and joining its faculty in 1962. His ties to the university run deep and generational. “I have always loved [it] a little more than it deserves,” he writes.
Where Harvard Went Wrong reflects this long attachment. The book gathers selected writings and speeches on Harvard stretching back to 1975—arguments that, as he puts it, “fell on deaf ears.” Mansfield recasts, in the third person, a 1986 speech he made to the faculty, opposing the establishment of a women’s studies concentration:
Professor Mansfield said that the appearance of this proposal on the faculty floor marked a foolish and almost pitiful surrender to feminism. . . . In his thirty-seven years at Harvard, Professor Mansfield had never seen a reading list more shameless and pathetic than this one. It began in the first term with “Classics of Feminist Theory I,” and then continued in the second term, not with “Classics of Non-Feminist Theory” but rather with “Classics of Feminist Theory II.” . . . There were no classics on the reading list. . . . There were no scientific studies, there was nothing on the psychology of sex differences, and there were, of course, no conservative critics of feminism.
The reading list suggested that “women’s studies” was a misnomer. This was feminist studies—the studies of a certain group of women, claiming to speak for all women. . . . The worst thing [students] would learn was that education meant the elaboration of the opinions one already had, and confirmation of one’s prejudices.
The speech “was a rhetorical triumph in reverse,” Mansfield says ruefully. “When I began it there were twenty or so on my side, and when I finished I was alone.”
The passage captures Mansfield in one of his more combative moods. Yet his prose is more often urbane than pugnacious. He writes with grace and charm, and he wears his erudition lightly. At one point, however, he allows himself the word eleemosynary—as if to remind us that he could, if he wished, make things more difficult.
A recurring feature of his work is an insistence on describing realities that some prefer to soften or ignore. Two of his longest-standing concerns have been affirmative action and grade inflation, both of which, he argues, rest on “the dubious morality of telling people they are something you wish they were but know they are not.”
Affirmative action’s defenders long claimed that the practice would enrich intellectual diversity. But somehow, Mansfield quips, the more DEI we have, “the less there is diversity of opinion.” Since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, Mansfield reports, public discussion of the issue has largely receded, “as if all those who adopted and prized it as the royal road to diversity are now ashamed of it.” That interpretation may be too sanguine. More likely, race conscious admissions will persist, even if under different terminology.
Grade inflation is another story. It eventually reached a point where almost everyone now recognizes it as untenable. A 2023 Harvard report found that 79 percent of grades in 2020–21were in the A range, up from 60 percent a decade earlier. But Mansfield began warning about the trend more than 50 years ago, at a 1975 Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting, and has never stopped. “A dean once told me that if I shut up I would get the action I wanted,” Mansfield recalls. “I tried that and it didn’t work.” Shortly after his book went to press, however, Harvard itself moved to recalibrate its grading. Henceforth, A’s at Harvard will be reserved for roughly the top fifth of students.
Being right too soon is a mixed blessing. Mansfield was also an early critic of higher education’s ideological conformity. He frequently invokes John Stuart Mill, who saw intellectual disagreement as a civic good. At a time of plummeting public trust in higher ed, Mansfield calls not for mere institutional neutrality—a low bar—but for a more genuinely pluralistic academic culture. Conservatives, he argues, “have reasons on their side and deserve to be welcomed in good cheer to America’s universities.”
Everyone who passed through Harvard the past 50 years—as I did, from 2001– 2009, in non-tenured roles—knew Mansfield by reputation. I was more left-wing then, but even so, I began noticing how readily conservative views were dismissed or ridiculed by those who prided themselves on being “inclusive.” Toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I started hosting salons in my Quincy House tutor suite, intended to promote intellectual diversity. I was pleased when they drew modest attention. Among my favorite frequent guests were sharp conservative writers from the Crimson and the Salient. In those conversations, a familiar asymmetry emerged: conservative students typically understood liberal arguments in depth, whereas many liberals and leftists had not engaged the strongest conservative opinions.
Where Harvard Went Wrong makes for congenial reading, especially for conservatives, who will find it an elegant guide for navigating contemporary academia. But liberals may discover something even more valuable: an invitation to engage arguments they have too often ignored. After all, as Mill observed, opposing views keep the mind alert—and do it good.