Harvard's 'Annoying Socratic Gadfly' Takes a Victory Lap

Harvey C. Mansfield, who enrolled at Harvard in 1949, joined the faculty in 1962, and retired in 2023, has been called many things: "great dissenter," "prophet," "racist, homophobic and misogynist," "sophist," "slipshod." Mansfield prefers "annoying Socratic gadfly." A dean once advised that he'd be more persuasive if he argued less. Mansfield says he tried, but it didn't work. "Retirement seems to strengthen my voice."

For six decades, Mansfield was the sharpest conservative thorn in the side of Harvard's body politic — a "one-man antidote to liberal complacency," in the words of the political scientist James Q. Wilson. Now he is watching from the sidelines as the complacency gets a comeuppance. The university has been under sustained pressure from the Trump administration, including a freeze on $2.3 billion in federal grants and contracts. Harvard has been more defiant than most; it filed a federal lawsuit challenging the funding freeze as unconstitutional. But the university has also made concessions on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Mansfield has a new book, The Manliness of Harvard, published this April. (An excerpt ran in these pages.) We met with Mansfield at his home outside Boston to talk about the state of Harvard, the state of higher education, and his views on how to fix it.

Goldstein: What has it felt like to watch Harvard under siege?

Mansfield: There are two ways to feel. One is good — the complacency has been disturbed, and that's good. The other is bad — they're disturbing it from the outside, and whatever changes come about are forced. I don't think it's a good thing for the change to be required from Washington. It won't hold.

Gutkin: You were at Harvard when it was not co-ed. It's gone through enormous changes. What's the most important change, for good or ill?

Mansfield: The feminizing of the university. I don't mean that it became full of women or more women. I mean that the spirit of the university now is one of sensitivity, protection from offense, and care for feelings. This is part of the feminine style of operating things. It's completely at odds with the original purpose of the university, which was intellectual controversy. Women are better at managing than men and so they've made the university into a place that is carefully managed. And the main thing that was opposed to that, namely intellectual controversy, has been suppressed. Free speech, in fact, is now not important in a university managed by people who don't want controversy.

Goldstein: You've written that Harvard should be more ideologically diverse and even that it should hire conservatives explicitly. Could you elaborate?

Mansfield: Race and sex are different from partisanship. Partisanship is opinions, and opinions are what need to be examined, disregarded or accepted, improved, refined. You need the kind of atmosphere in which it's not assumed that you are one sort of person.

Goldstein: So affirmative action to encourage a diversity of ideas, because ideas are the coin of the academic realm, is appropriate. Whereas yoking affirmative action to race and gender is inappropriate?

Mansfield: Conservatives differ on this. Some of them think we should cover up the fact that we're conservative and try to be nonpartisan. I doubt that approach will work. I think it has to be explicit that you're hiring conservatives.

Gutkin: You write: "It's better not to attack partisanship as such, but to moderate it by insisting that it be shared with the other side." Wouldn't this risk installing a logic of partisan politics right at the center of the academy in a way that would make it anything but an ivory tower?

Mansfield: You're making abstract arguments that don't relate to the situation. The situation is that we have two parties in our country, and one of them is 90 percent in charge of higher education. And that needs to change. You need to come up with something to address that and stop offering querulous philosophy-department-type questions.

Goldstein: You're saying that the partisan disparity within higher ed is so great that you don't have the patience to entertain how your proposed hiring program can go sideways?

Mansfield: I helped found the first one at Arizona State. There are all kinds of problems that come from being a startup of any kind. The civics institutes have not been welcomed by the faculty that's already there, including the few conservatives. They see themselves as the real conservatives, not these Johnny-come-latelies who get paid more.

Mansfield: I love Harvard, and I don't want to surrender it to the extreme left. Also, people have always been polite and genial, and nobody tries to bother me. Maybe they think I'm too old to matter.