Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears
Harvey C. Mansfield
Encounter Books, 2026, 144 pp.
Harvey Mansfield, who was for decades a professor in the Harvard University Department of Government, bemoans the lack of diversity on his campus, and by “diversity,” he does not mean the woke slogan, so much in vogue today, which he vehemently opposes. Quite the contrary, he wants Harvard to be more politically diverse—to have more people like him, to put it bluntly.
Where Harvard Went Wrong collects his columns for the Harvard Crimson and his remarks at faculty meetings. Mansfield scores some effective blows against left-wing shibboleths. He challenged the faculty on support for Harvard divestiture of the stocks it held in the apartheid government of South Africa. Why, he asked at a faculty meeting in May 1979, didn’t the faculty likewise condemn Communist genocide?
“Professor Harvey Mansfield said that the faculty was being asked by its friends on the left to take a symbolic action, or to make a speech—a kind of speaking out—against an undoubted evil, the evil of apartheid. Apartheid, however, was not as evil as genocide. There had been recent instances of genocide in Cambodia, so Harvard speaking out on the question of apartheid would be in the context of its silence on the question of genocide. What could justify this? He did not think that the mere lack of stock ownership could justify its silence on Cambodia.”
Though he was right to note the failure of the faculty to denounce Communist genocide, he failed to point out that the campaign against South Africa was the product of Communist propaganda, most definitely including that liberal icon Nelson Mandela, a member in good standing of the South African Communist Party
Mansfield supports freedom of speech, and he effectively criticized efforts by feminists to deplatform those who challenged their dogmas, but on this too his challenge to what prevails has its limits. On the one hand, he says:
“Feminism is a kind of liberalism, and liberalism has an inherent dilemma regarding diversity. With its respect for liberty, liberalism promotes diversity of opinion, believing with John Stuart Mill that opposition to your view keeps you awake and does you a favor. But liberalism also believes in progress through liberation from prejudice such as is found, allegedly, in sexism. From this aspect liberalism sees no reason to answer challenges from reactionaries and to refight battles already won. In the spirit of progress, feminism feels justified in dismissing its critics—another reason for refusing to argue with them. Yet the strongest cause of intolerance comes from the multiculturalism that the feminists have taken on board. Multiculturalism is a strange combination of relativism and moralism. All cultures are equal and none can be privileged—that’s the relativism. But because some people claim privilege and use it to oppress others, they must be excluded from power and status—there’s the moralism.”
On the other hand, free speech must be “responsible,” and it transpires that an example of that responsibility is another left-wing icon with Communist connections, Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Free speech prospers when great speakers show the value of speech as opposed to expression. To illustrate this, consider two great men disagreeing over a question vital for us: Should one obey an unjust law? Abraham Lincoln said yes; Martin Luther King Jr., more influential today, said no—one should engage in civil disobedience instead. In his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ King took responsibility for his actions. No mask to hide him; no lawyers to excuse him.”
I do not think that my readers will regard the reference to Lincoln as a “great man” as altogether unproblematic.
Mansfield finds that even responsible speech has its limits, as it turns out. In wartime, everyone must close ranks in support of the government, and civil liberties must be limited as needed for the duration of the conflict. A faculty minute from April 2003, just after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, noted:
“Professor Harvey Mansfield, Department of Government, wished for peace as soon as possible. He said a victorious peace could be anticipated, and he also wished to express his support for America’s troops, for its government, for President George W. Bush, and for the country as a whole. With regard to the USA PATRIOT Act, he would point out that civil liberties consisted of principles and circumstances, and that the circumstances of war were different from those of peace. The United States was at war with terrorists who had killed three thousand Americans in attacks on the homeland, and whose malice was limited only by their means. During times of war, the government was the American population’s protector, and the majority of the population was more at risk than the minority. Although civil liberties would continue, the way in which they were defended changed during wartime.”
Never mind that the war was unconstitutional and that the “victorious peace” turned out to be a quagmire from which we have not fully extricated ourselves to this day. The notion that the way civil liberties are defended changes during wartime is Orwellian.
As his glowing reference to Lincoln suggests, Mansfield accepts the anti-South view of the War Between the States. How can people accuse Harvard of having colluded with slavery, when Union soldiers died to free blacks from slavery? he wonders:
“Recently my university issued a report titled ‘Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery.’ It listed minor incidents inflated to claim that slavery was a misdeed of Harvard, requiring that all Harvard should adopt the measures of woke as contrite repentance for its legacy of white supremacy. This report is effectually contradicted by the most prominent building on the campus, Memorial Hall, completed in 1878 to enshrine the memory of Harvard graduates who died in the Civil War on the Union side.”
Never mind the fact that the war was not fought to end slavery, that it caused immense loss of life, and that it ended the limited confederation on which the American Republic had been founded.
We have not yet gotten to the essence of Mansfield’s sort of conservatism. He is an elitist who sees Harvard as a meritocracy that has led America to greatness and can do so again if leftist attempts to undermine elitism are defeated:
“Today the tension between equality and excellence is shown in attacks on ‘elitism.’ This aversion would naturally arise in people who believe that they gain no advantage from a system rewarding excellence because they do not have it themselves. They share the spirit of democratic ostracism in the Athenians, who exiled Aristides because he was too just. In this view excellence is a source of danger to the people because it will be used to exploit them rather than benefit them. Or if excellence is not a danger, it is an irritation and its mere existence a slight to average folk. Anyone better than you has a claim on your admiration that your vanity may find irksome. ‘Elitism’ means taking the side of the elite against the rest. Those opposed to elitism alternate between denying the worth of any elite and alleging that people suffer under an unjustified existing elite that is harmful. These anti-elitist folks are at present in charge of American education. They are themselves an elite, an elite united against elitism. . . .
“An earlier generation of liberals thought and acted otherwise. They came on the scene after World War II and included in their number many Jews who for the first time were getting the university admissions and appointments they deserved. . . . This generation in academia was conscious of being an elite and proud of having replaced an inferior elite. They understood that the principle of excellence that they had espoused, and which of course benefited them, was one that had to be applied to their own students and to their own families.”
Mansfield concludes that “our democracy needs an elitism of merit, of Jefferson’s ‘virtue and talents,’ in combination with its relentless drive toward equality.” I do not think that the sort of nationalist elitism Mansfield favors is what Jefferson had in mind.
