I have never met Harvey Mansfield, the distinguished scholar and Harvard University Professor of Government, Emeritus, but he strikes me as the kind of professor I had in my first graduate course at Georgia State University, then a commuter college in downtown Atlanta, in 1992. That professor taught Early American Literature with the appreciation, insight, and knowledge of a traditional scholar.
But he was a member of a vanishing breed. My next two professors (before I learned about classes taught by the older “old school” professors) had me sputtering in rage, both internally and in class discussions. I soon learned, as Mansfield wrote in 1990, that “the ‘enduring classics'” had “fallen victim to ‘deconstructing’—better to say destructive—interpretations that examine their noble authors for signs of racism, sexism, and elitism, convict them before a partial judge; and sentence them to public whipping, torture, mutilation, and, if it were possible, oblivion.”
Fortunately, this essay, “The State of Harvard,” along with seven essays written for the Harvard Crimson student newspaper in the spring of 2025; a series of imaginatively re-created faculty meeting minutes, including his speeches and remarks (sometimes greeted with laughter), between 1975 and 2006; and various speeches, essays, and reviews that chronicle the decline of Harvard and American higher education have been collected in Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf Ears.
Mansfield, a Harvard man from his undergraduate and graduate student days, to his 61-year (1962 to 2023) tenure as a professor there, charts, decade by decade, the slide into stupidity of our nation’s oldest and once most prestigious university.
He begins with a faculty meeting speech about “grade inflation” in 1975 and then presents the questions that occurred to him through the decades, such as: in 1979, why apartheid was considered to be a worse evil than genocide in Cambodia; in 1981, the creation of new academic positions for affirmative action hires; in 1986, the establishment of women’s studies (even though women’s lives are inextricably linked with men’s), and in 1992 of environmental studies (instead of the traditional sciences); and the proposed exclusion of the commissioning of ROTC on commencement day 1992 and the exclusion of ROTC from the accepted activities to fulfill a new requirement for public service in 1994.
Mansfield wryly presents the contradictions. In his “Remarks in Acceptance of the Bradley Prize” (2011), he notes how “stereotypes are necessary to diversity,” asking, for example, “How can a black student represent diversity if he does not think and behave according to the stereotype people expect?” The justification for diversity is based on the idea that “black people and women would bring in their ‘lived experience’ to the faculty,” with the assumption that lived experiences would be the same for all members of a group. Similarly, the ideologues of the “women’s movement” (as it was called before the very existence of “woman” was questioned) exclude “women as traditionally defined.” By 2023, as Mansfield wrote in “Thoughts on Woke,” the “consequence of feminism,” “a failed rebellion against nature,” was evidenced in transgenderism, or “fake women.” Yes, as Mansfield remarked in a 1990 essay, “the ideal of diversity-mongers seems to be a cosmopolis of all categories of society’s victims where everyone says the same thing in unison, like the Coca-Cola ad.”
Affirmative action for diversity ushers in ideological conformity through the back door and results in the degradation of scholarship.
Exhibit A is Claudine Gay, a Harvard professor of government and African American studies, who plagiarized significant parts of her dissertation on the intellectually unchallenging subject of the success of black politicians. As Mansfield writes in his Preface, in 2023, upon the announcement of her presidency, Gay openly rejected “the Ivory Tower view of the university.” She announced that Harvard would henceforth “consider itself a ‘part of society,'” thus surrendering the “independence of the university.” But Gay was simply repeating the aims of the Radical Caucus at the 1969 American Historical Association meeting. Social justice replaced truth as the objective in humanities scholarship. Ideological allegiance replaced intelligence in hiring as evidenced by Gay’s inability to comprehend the charges against her of allowing calls for genocide against Jewish students during the congressional hearings in 2023. Yet, she remains at Harvard as a professor, earning close to a million dollars a year.
Academics played the waiting game, secure in the knowledge that tenured professors like Mansfield would retire and be replaced with like-minded ideologues—and the less intelligent the better for their purposes.
Mansfield was tolerated but ignored as he made quite logical objections to such developments as political correctness, anti-Westernism, diversity, politicized academic concentrations, student evaluations, lowered academic standards, and the confusion of expression with speech.
I, too, objected and began writing about the rot. During the Obama years, I implored Tea Party groups to call their state representatives and object to public universities sponsoring Marxist literature conferences and their professors giving extra credit to students who lobbied legislators against immigration enforcement. Often, my tales about English departments (such as “Shakesqueer” conferences) were met with incredulity or brushed aside as consequential to English majors only. But the crazy ideas in humanities higher education have been manifested as kindergarten and workplace DEI struggle sessions.
Pardon the cynicism and bitterness of this canceled college instructor.
Mansfield is more charitable than I am. Even in 2025, in an essay for the Crimson, “Conservative Faculty Need Affirmative Action,” he continued to plead for reform from within, for “bipartisanship.”
The name of the game, however, is power, as I discovered in graduate school upon reading the postmodern theorist Michel Foucault. Like Foucault, academics pride themselves on exposing the power structures of the West. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, the “deconstructing” that Mansfield cited in 1990, aims to dismantle the power structures of Western civilization, down to the basic meanings of language and logical ways of thinking. It has been taken up by feminists, post-colonialists, queer theorists, new historicists, and reader-response theorists. Academics gain satisfaction from acting as champions of the powerless oppressed as they gain power within the academy through tenure and appointment to hiring committees. The postmodern academy operates much like the Politburo, including disappearing (or “canceling”) deviationists. The token conservative serves only their propaganda purposes.
President Trump, unlike his predecessors, decided to put a stop to it by using the tools at his disposal: civil rights law and federal funding. Yet, Mansfield is critical of the Trump administration’s use of “overwhelming pressure” and “roughhouse excesses.”
But the tenured sociopaths have used conservative professors’ reluctance to engage in political battles to their advantage. They laughed at our logic, eloquence, research, and ethics, while they stirred up student mobs to drown out speakers, take over buildings, and attack dissenters.
Where Harvard Went Wrong provides a real-time account of a world of gentlemen and lady scholars slipping away. It is hopeless to think that those like Gay and her barbaric cohort could appreciate Mansfield’s wry, elegiac humor. But the rest of us must use the account to argue for a return to the academy’s true purpose. The first step is to restore law and order on our campuses.
Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears
by Harvey C. Mansfield
Encounter Books, 144 pp., $24.99
Mary Grabar, a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, is the author of three books debunking Howard Zinn, the 1619 Project, and most recently, FDR.
Read the full article here
