In a 1975 essay exploring Leo Strauss’ interpretation of Machiavelli, Harvey C. Mansfield asserts that “no paragraph in The Prince and the Discourses has been understood until you have found something funny in it.” Consequently, advises Mansfield, “If you are not in more or less constant amusement when reading Machiavelli’s books, you should consider yourself bewildered.” Mansfield’s amusing observations about the philosophical importance of amusement to Machiavelli’s exploration of serious matters apply to Mansfield’s many writings, certainly his amusingly titled new book, “Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears.”
This is not, as he cautioned about Machiavelli, to suggest that Mansfield’s “true meaning is a joke.” It is to recognize that the playfulness suffusing his diagnosis of Harvard’s ills and, more broadly, those of liberal education in America, colors his trenchant observations, stringent criticisms, and provocative reform proposals. That his faculty-meeting speeches, occasional contributions to The Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper), and very presence on campus typically bewildered when they didn’t appall his colleagues bespeaks their humorlessness and moralism, blindness to intellectual excellence, and indifference or hostility to liberal education’s imperatives.
Mansfield arrived at Harvard in 1949 as a freshman. He earned his Ph.D. in government in 1961, joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 after a brief stint at the University of California Berkeley, and retired from Harvard’s government department in 2023. A premier scholar of the history of political philosophy, Mansfield’s wonderful writings on Burke, Machiavelli, the spirit of liberalism, constitutional government, electoral politics, executive power, manliness, feminism, the continuities and complexities of modern political philosophy, and more, can be dense, intricate, and elusive. They always entice.
Mansfield’s writings depart from the professional norm. Most political scientists, applying natural-science methods to human affairs, produce technical work fit for consumption only by fellow political scientists. And most political theorists publish scholarship of studied abstraction that requires many years of specialization to decipher. In contrast, Mansfield explores the different orientations toward politics of citizens, politicians, and statesmen, and their characteristic opinions, actions, and aims. His scholarship on the history of political philosophy and commentary on public affairs employ terms that in some cases have acquired an archaic ring – interest, spiritedness, honor, pride, ambition, regime, rule, virtue, justice, and the pursuit of truth – but in Mansfield’s deft formulations regain their power to capture the intricacies of human affairs.
Mansfield likes to disconcert the guardians of conventional wisdom. His faculty biography mischievously noted that he wrote “in defense of a defensible liberalism.” His signature course on moral reasoning in Harvard’s core curriculum asked subversively whether it was reasonable to be moral. And he occasionally offered a seminar, “Right and Left,” devoted to Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
In the early 1990s, I arrived at Harvard as an assistant professor in the government department. Mansfield promptly invited me to co-teach Harvard’s upper-level, year-long introductory sequence – ancient and medieval political philosophy in the fall semester and modern political philosophy in the spring semester. With spellbinding lectures polished from decades of educating smart undergraduates and graduate students, the distinguished veteran scholar had no need of my assistance. I, though, benefitted immensely from observing a master in action.
Most of my Harvard senior colleagues spoke piously about democracy, equality, and community while lording their status over junior colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduates. In contrast, while espousing discipline, order, and excellence, Mansfield treated colleagues and students graciously and respectfully as fellow participants in a noble enterprise. (I should mention that in the late 1990s I parted with Harvard on bad terms, but the lawsuit that I lodged in 2000 against the university for violating its own rules and regulations in denying me tenure, while ultimately rejected by the Massachusetts courts, provided invaluable lessons in university dysfunction, malfeasance, and misgovernance and in the chicanery of results-oriented jurisprudence.)
Mansfield’s new book collects a half-century of faculty speeches, op-eds, and essays on the state of Harvard. While highly critical of his alma mater and longtime employer, he confesses that “I love Harvard wisely and not too well: just a little more than it deserves.” He received little if any love in return from colleagues and administrators. “As a professor,” he reports, “I was not hounded or shunned – not for the most part anyway – but I was treated with polite, even genial, disdain.”
Mansfield’s two main causes at Harvard were affirmative action and grade inflation. He opposed both because they undermined the university’s educational mission.
By focusing on physical characteristics, Mansfield argued in a 2025 Harvard Crimson op-ed, affirmative action diminished intellectual diversity. Its proponents maintained that by diversifying “skin color” and “body type,” affirmative action would enrich the university through “the point of view that black people and women would bring in their ‘lived experience’ to the faculty.” In practice, observes Mansfield, affirmative action did not yield “much new or different” in the way of opinions but rather “mostly added to the number of the left.”
Meanwhile, grade inflation has been running amok for decades. Based on faculty minutes and Mansfield’s contemporaneous notes, in a November 1975 speech at a Harvard faculty meeting he “declared that when one considered that last June 85 percent of the class had graduated with honors and that seventy-three people had earned summa cum laude, the highest honors, it was possible to question how much of an honor it was to graduate from Harvard with honors.” Mansfield acquired a reputation for almost singlehandedly opposing the common practice at Harvard, especially in the humanities and some social sciences, of awarding around half of students grades of A or A minus. In remarks at a 2000 faculty meeting he noted that in recent years, “at the Kennedy School of Government, 70 percent or more of the grades given were A’s.”
The problem with grade inflation as it is with affirmative action, Mansfield emphasizes, is that it corrupts academic standards. He appreciates that Harvard students are generally bright, but he doubts that they are equally bright. He also doubts that his colleagues’ proclivity for promiscuously handing out A’s stems from a 1960s-style belief that “grading is an undemocratic act of oppression by teachers over students.” These days it reflects laziness and fecklessness: “Grade inflation has become a thoughtless routine convenient for faculty members, students, parents, and administrators, in which an individual professor assigns lenient grades to his students as unconsciously as a parent might spoil his children.”
Mansfield does not mention in the present collection the entertaining compromise he announced in February 2001 at the beginning of his course on modern political philosophy. He explained to students that henceforth he would hand out two grades at the end of the semester: one that students deserved and, to avoid punishing those taking his classes, a second grade that would go on their transcript consistent with Harvard’s inflated grading.
Both affirmative action and grade inflation, contends Mansfield, weaken democracy by fostering hostility toward meritocracy. The recognition and encouragement of excellence is crucial: It supplies talent for tasks and undertakings vital to freedom, prosperity, and self-government while reducing the undemocratic social and political influence of birth, status, and group identity. He courteously refrains from mentioning his Harvard Government Department colleague Michael Sandel’s bashing of meritocracy. In a 2020 book, Sandel went so far as to denounce meritocracy as tyranny and accuse Harvard of conspiring to impose its evils on the nation. Still, Mansfield made a habit of elegantly if sharply criticizing Harvard presidents and deans – Derek Bok, Henry Rosovsky, Neil Rudenstine, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Claudine Gay, among others – for their inability to escape the gravitational pull of progressive orthodoxy.
Mansfield’s larger cause, which unites his lesser ones, is to preserve and improve traditional liberal education, which prepares students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom. To advance the cause of liberal education, it is necessary to depart occasionally from Mansfield’s practical judgments. His uncharacteristically reserved critique of Harvard’s politicized and hollow core curriculum, for example, understates his university’s failure to introduce students to American ideas and institutions, Western civilization, and other civilizations. And his “remedy for Harvard’s present pervasive partisanship” falls short. Openly hiring conservative professors to check and balance Harvard’s overwhelming preponderance of progressive professors as he proposes is impractical since the academy reduced to a trickle conservatives flowing through the pipeline. And his proposal is counterproductive because it would exacerbate politicization of campus intellectual life. Colleges and universities should instead hire for missing subject-matter expertise. They sorely lack courses in vital areas in which conservatives tend to specialize such as the history of political philosophy as well as constitutional, diplomatic, military, and religious history. Beginning to repair these enormous gaps in the curriculum would increase the number of conservative professors.
These friendly amendments aim to adjust Mansfield’s policy analysis in light of his principles.
All things considered, one is unlikely to come by a more illuminating – or amusing – point of departure for understanding what ails higher education in America than Harvey C. Mansfield’s examination of where Harvard went wrong.
