Harvard University was once a highly respected academic institution where, it was assumed, students could receive a superior education. But it has become clear that to a great extent Harvard merely propagandizes them.
One of the very few Harvard professors who dares to speak freely about the university and its shortcomings is Harvey Mansfield. In today’s Martin Center article, John Staddon reviews Mansfield’s new book about the university.
“Mansfield is proud to be conservative,” he writes,
one of an almost extinct breed at Harvard and other elite universities. He has been arguing several positions that . . . are evidently regarded as impossibly reactionary by Mansfield’s colleagues: opposition to racial affirmative action (given the current intellectual climate, he supports affirmative action that favors conservative faculty), the importance of rigorous grading (given widespread grade inflation) and restoring of the Ivory Tower (no, Harvard is not just another consumer product).
Mansfield famously used to give students two grades: the one he thought they deserved and the one that Harvard expected so as to keep the kids happy.
Worse is the way Harvard has allowed its curriculum to be taken over by ideological radicals. Staddon writes: “’Studies’” departments are usually activist cells with political aims rather than disinterested truth-seeking. Indeed, many feminist pronouncements explicitly deny the possibility of objective (male-defined?) truth. Mansfield comments on the Harvard Women’s Studies reading list: ‘no Plato, Aristophanes, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton. No scientific studies…’”
Whether Harvard can be saved is an open question, but at least Mansfield has pointed to problems that real educational leaders might be able to fix or avoid at their schools.