In the title of a piece today, I call Harvey Mansfield “our professor.” What do I mean by that? I give the answer in the piece itself: “He is a conservative, one of the few at Harvard, if not the only one. We conservatives — wherever we live, wherever we have gone to college — value him highly.”
Mansfield has started his new school year, at Harvard, as he has been doing for quite a while. He matriculated as a freshman in 1949; he joined the faculty in 1962.
With him, I have discussed some key questions: “What is a ‘liberal,’ what is a ‘conservative’? Do ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ still have meaning? What is college for?”
There is also the question of manliness — about which Mansfield wrote a book, about 15 years ago. The question of manliness has been in the air lately: What constitutes a “real man”?
Let me publish a note from a colleague of mine, Nick Frankovich:
Mansfield gave a talk at Columbia shortly after Manliness was published. A theatrical left-wing student and then a theatrical right-wing student went at it and made some pitch for the audience’s attention. I forget what their pretexts were. I remember that Mansfield kept his composure, sense of humor, and grace.
I can picture it. Easy to picture.
In a column last week, I mentioned Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and, in particular, George F. Will’s opinion of it. Writing in June 1986, when it was playing in theaters, George called Ferris “the greatest movie of all time.”
He elaborated, “By ‘greatest movie’ I mean the moviest movie, the one most true to the general spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless escapism.”
A note from a reader:
Hi, Jay,
. . . I am writing to argue with George Will about Ferris Bueller. Ferris is awesome, but the best movie that year was Back to School, with good old Rodney Dangerfield. Thirty-six years later and I can still quote lines from it and almost laugh like a 13-year-old again. Here’s to the Triple Lindy and have a great day.
In May of this year, I published a picture by Hans Goeckner, a physics prof in Chicago. It was of a northern flicker. He has sent me a different picture — of the newly restored dome in the Chicago Cultural Center. An article about the restoration says,
Installed in 1897 as a feature of the Chicago Public Library, the 40-foot diameter Tiffany-designed stained-glass dome had become covered in grime and paint, and cut off from the natural light that brought out the brilliant colors of the glass.
Writes Professor Goeckner,
I was walking past the center last Friday and decided I’d never seen the dome in person. I had to put my phone (I didn’t have my proper camera with me) on the floor with the lens zoomed out to the widest angle to get the whole glass dome.
Just great. Thanks to one and all.
