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 hat
a joke tenure has become. Academic tenure was supposed to free
its beneficiaries to speak openly and
honestly
in the face of intimidation. But there are so many more things
to be afraid of than losing your job. To speak the truth about
affirmative action or grade inflation in today's university is to
invite protest, harassment, and ostracism. To openly oppose a public-policy
reform like gay marriage is to invite the same. Two professors
at Montreal's McGill University found this out recently when their
plans to testify against gay marriage in a major Canadian court
case brought a storm of protest down on their heads from gay student
organizations. It is this fear of protest, harassment, and ostracism
that silences those tenured professors who might otherwise speak
out against the dogmas of the day.
So let us all hail Harvey Mansfield, possibly the only professor
left in the academy with the guts to use tenure the way it was meant
to be used. I know that NRO readers have been hearing a good deal
about Mansfield lately, but that's because his years of courage
in the face of moral intimidation may finally be drawing real blood
from his countless foes. Mansfield's brilliant decision to give
his students both an inflated grade and a real grade may be on the
verge of drawing national attention onto the distortions forced
on the academy by sixties thinking in general, and affirmative action
in particular. ABC's 20/20 was just at Harvard investigating the
grade-inflation problem, and Harvard's student newspaper, the Crimson,
has just published an
important piece that not only confirms the reality of grade
inflation, but also gives considerable credence to Mansfield's controversial
claim that affirmative action helped cause grade inflation to begin
with.
When Mansfield released figures showing that more than half of all
Harvard grades are A's or A minuses, he made the front page of the
Boston Globe, and saw the story picked up by
| “It
is this fear of protest, harassment, and ostracism that
silences those tenured professors who might otherwise
speak out against the dogmas of the day.” |
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the
Associated Press. But sentiment quickly turned against Mansfield
when he let it be known that, in his view, affirmative action was
one of the major engines driving grade inflation. Harvard's Black
Student's Association quickly demanded Mansfield's censure, and
staged a sit-in at one of his lectures. But the in-depth story
just published by the Crimson presents considerable evidence
for Mansfield's assertion.
The Crimson story is remarkable in itself, since many a student
paper would shy away from the fair-minded assessment of the issue
that the Crimson presents us with. Only yesterday, the Daily
Cal, UC Berkeley's student newspaper, ran a craven apology by
its editors for having allowed a paid ad opposing reparations for
slavery to appear in its pages. Yet the increasing willingness
of Harvard's Crimson to give conservative critiques of the
academy a fair hearing is a hopeful sign. It just may be that the
overwhelming dominance of the Left at our colleges and universities
is on the verge of provoking an open counter-reaction by thoughtful
students.
Because transcripts are kept secret, no one can definitively document
the relationship between affirmative action and grade inflation.
But plenty of people are quoted by the Crimson supporting
Mansfield's claim that fear of handing out low grades to minority
students admitted under affirmative action helped to launch grade
inflation in the late sixties and early seventies. My own recent
experience teaching at Harvard tells me that little has changed
since then.
I certainly remember hearing older graduate students in the late
seventies saying that they couldn't hand out bad grades to minorities.
And when I taught at Harvard in the late nineties, although there
were certainly minority students who performed at a high level,
there was no doubt that my weakest students were disproportionately
African American and Hispanic. Often the gap between these minority
students and the rest was dramatic. That put me in a difficult
position. If my minority students received lower grades than the
others, I might be accused of racism. And given the fact that I
was already fighting my fellow faculty members over leftist bias
in the curriculum, low minority grades might easily be used as a
weapon to silence me.
It isn't just fear either; it's also love. I cared deeply for my
students. It wasn't the fault of my weaker minority students that
some elite liberal's guilt had thrown them into a situation for
which they were ill prepared. They might easily have flourished
at another college. My sections and seminars were small and I got
to know all of my students quite well. It hurts to give a kid who's
honestly trying to do his best the kind of grade that, at Harvard,
can only bring shame. Fear and love — it takes more than tenure
to gainsay their power. In the end, it's best to grade your students
honestly — for their sake and yours. But it's hardly a surprise,
given the terrible distortions and pressures created by admitting
good kids who aren't quite up to it, that few professors do so.
Of course there's more than affirmative action at work here. Grade
inflation certainly owes much to the student evaluations of professors
instituted since the sixties. Given the tight teaching market,
student evaluations can make or break a teaching assistant's career.
And bad grades often — although not always — yield bad
evaluations. And there's no doubt that the sixties ethos has made
it difficult to force anyone to feel bad by giving them something
as nasty as a low grade. I remember trying to flunk a (non-minority)
Harvard student years ago when I was a teaching assistant. Not
only did he hand in failing work, he'd skipped out on classes.
For me, his shirking of class was the last straw. But the tenured
professors who ran the class forced me to raise the grade. They
knew that a failing grade would only bring down Harvard's scrutiny.
And despite their tenure, Harvard had plenty of ways of making their
time at the university unpleasant.
That little boy who shamed an emperor into acknowledging his own
nakedness was too young to fear the wrath of king or crowd. But
Harvey Mansfield is a man, not a boy. And what a man. Harvard
University Press, in an act of intellectual bigotry turned down
Mansfield's proposal for a book on manliness. I, for one, would
do anything to learn the secret of this man's virile courage. I
speak from outside the academy, where I can escape the cost of my
words. Yet day by day, year by year, Harvey C. Mansfield transforms
the academy from within — with truth, with spirit, with courage.
A simple grade of A is inadequate to this performance. In a massive
national professorate, this man has no peer.
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