Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf Ears, Harvey C. Mansfield, Encounter Books, 2026, pp. 136, $22.00 hardcover.
Harvey Mansfield is an embarrassment. Every time he opens his mouth or picks up a pen to comment on higher education and Harvard in particular, the embarrassments commence. He rises in a faculty meeting on November 10th, 1992, to address Harvard’s decision to deny an ROTC program on campus until the no-gays-in-the-military policy of that time was changed. Mansfield doesn’t take a stand on the policy, though. He makes a more biting point, asking what any of his colleagues in the hall know about “how the military should be run.” (43) None of them “had written a book or article on the subject of military discipline, had served in the armed forces, or had been in combat where the question might have arisen.” Where do they get off opining on this case (which was a big controversy for the just-elected Bill Clinton)?
You see where the embarrassment lies. Elite academics believe deeply in their intelligence and discernment, their high standards and fulfilment of them. It’s their main claim to lofty position. How many times have liberal professors answered conservative critics of campus bias with the ad hominem, “You don’t know what we’re about—you’re not qualified, not credentialed, not smart enough … ”? And here comes Mansfield challenging their expertise, telling them they have no competence on the matter, that maybe they aren’t always the smartest guys in the room.
The episode is taken from the minutes of that day’s assembly of Arts and Sciences faculty. As you can see, the criticism is academic, not political, a question of standards, not opinion. This volume gathers in one section twenty-three such interventions by Mansfield in meetings from 1976 to 2006, each one an urbane dissent from the faculty resolve. In November 1986, when a proposal to approve women’s studies as a field of concentration is put forward, Mansfield calls it “a project of such low quality,” the invention of “some pressure group,” then reminds attendees, “This was Harvard, with standards to maintain.” (40) When in December, 1992, a similar plan for Environmental Studies was submitted, which emphasized “current problems of the environment,” Mansfield noted that, “Universities were for permanent problems,” not momentary ones of the kind that “one wanted to read about in magazines.” (46) The theme is the same: please, let’s be serious. Two years later, when a new dean of public service was proposed, Mansfield asserted that students came to Harvard to study, not to be public servants. Service activities, too, would embroil the school in political affairs that the faculty believe they have the wisdom to handle, but they don’t:
You think you are so smart. You think you are so moral. You think that if your intelligence fails, your morality will come to the rescue, and if your morality fails, your intelligence will save you. Well, buy yourselves some warm scarves. It is going to be a long winter for you. (51)
If you’ve attended school-wide faculty meetings, you can imagine the scene, the sole antagonist issuing wry remarks on how Harvard now served as “an intellectual branch of the Democratic Party” (46) and announcing as the faculty gave in to feminists and approved women’s studies, “Girls of America, if you want a husband you can push around, marry a professor.” (42) Is there anything more irritating to distinguished academics than to be told that they’re not so bright, maybe even a little dumb, and that they’re not to be taken seriously? For them, the greatest disqualifier is mediocrity, and Mansfield informs them of their own versions of it, for instance, in the 1990s when Harvard gave honorary degrees to the heads of the Philippines, Norway, and Ireland, and he comments, “three women, three liberals, and three mediocrities.” (61) Harvard’s notorious grade inflation, too, which Mansfield has decried for decades, doesn’t signal that every undergrad in Cambridge is a genius. Rather, it merits the longstanding joke: “What’s the hardest thing about Harvard? Getting in.” (18)
That Mansfield has a scholarly record and teaching history that deserves a distinguished professorship makes his withering and ironic sallies even more exasperating. His students and longtime readers are everywhere in conservative intellectual circles (I just received a copy of Michael Anton’s new book which lists Mansfield with Harry Jaffe and Tom Wolfe as men “I admired the most.”) In the minutes of the Arts and Sciences meetings, faculty laughter is often recorded, which seems to be in appreciation of the wit, not mean-spirited, a sign that professors admit him as one of their own. And yet, one senses in the laughter a cosmopolitan shrug, an indulgence of an admittedly sharp colleague with the wrong ideas. Let him amuse us with the usual objections from the right, they think to themselves, then we shall proceed with the work of progress. As Mansfield acknowledges in the preface, during his 61 years as professor, “I was not hounded or shunned—not for the most part anyway—but I was treated with polite, even genial disdain.” (v) The laughter is a way to keep this physically diminutive man an institutionally diminutive figure, and do so without having to debate him.
It’s a cautious move on their part, because at all times Mansfield’s commentaries presume ideals of higher education that Harvard has repeatedly violated. General education courses are supposed to endow students with the knowledge and skills an educated American possesses. But when Harvard revised its core twenty years ago, it took an “approaches to knowledge” direction, which set ways of thinking (quantitative, historical, etc.) above objects of thinking (say, the Founding documents). Mansfield writes in reply that “approaches” is just a “disguise” for the fact that Harvard does not care about students “acquiring the most fundamental knowledge or understanding the most fundamental problems.” (76) Affirmative action is praised as a great equalizer, giving the underprivileged a chance to compete, but way back in 1975 Mansfield identified the distortions to come, whereby the rich, privately-schooled woman with a Harvard Ph.D. is categorically favored over the middle-class guy from Ohio who’s good enough to get a Dartmouth degree and a Yale Ph.D. (38) In 1996, Mansfield observed there was a 95-point SAT gap between black and white admits to Harvard, a glaring difference that kept the defenders of affirmative action from “speaking frankly about what they have done, about what they had to do, to bring diversity.” (101) As for grade inflation, “most everyone sees it is mistaken,” (18) but nobody joined Mansfield in trying to do something about it (“not one of them was willing to join conservative objectors to it.”)
The faculty are compromised. They are stuck with notions and practices that they know don’t hold up to scrutiny—and Mansfield scrutinizes them. “How Harvard Compromised Its Virtue,” an article originally in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2003) and published here as Chapter 13, recounts how authority has flipped in Cambridge, the male professors shrinking in guilt in the face of feminist accusation and becoming downright grateful to students for the respect they show to them. (108)
He’s on the inside, at the top floor of the Ivory Tower, in closed meetings and hallway conversations. In 2005 while writing his book on manliness, he attended a sexual-orientation session for freshmen and marveled at presenters trying to “orient the two sexes without mentioning their names.” (23) Mansfield is blunt: “transgender identities are fake” (132); “Woke is a political attack on the distinctions that normal people make and live by” (12); “Identitarians … think of themselves as godlike because they hold the power to take and give offense” (131); Harvard came about because, “For some reason there was no university of indigenous persons waiting to greet the Puritans when they arrived” (134); and so on.
Yes, Mansfield is an embarrassment for the academic left, because he knows their ways and means so well and has the courage to call them out. It was a six-decade run in the premier university in the world, and in spite of his adversarial status he leaves Harvard without a single stain on his career or reputation. There is a downside to this volume, however, a sad coda. Mansfield has no successors. He is unique and irreplaceable.
Mark Bauerlein is professor emeritus of English at Emory University and a current member of the Board of Directors at the National Association of Scholars; engmb@emory.edu. His latest books are The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults (Regnery, 2022); The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, co-edited with Adam Bellow (Templeton, 2015); and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2011). Bauerlein last appeared in these pages with his article “The Woke Effect” in the summer of 2024, a review essay on Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke and Christopher F. Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution.
Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr