Where Harvard Went Wrong contains Harvey Mansfield’s addresses, spanning fifty years, to Harvard colleagues and students. Mansfield’s plea is, and has always been, that Harvard abandon its partisanship with the left and adopt instead a bipartisan position that welcomes conservatives as well as liberals.
With the humor and grace necessary to a longtime lone conservative voice, Mansfield tackles the consequences that intolerant wokeism has wrought upon the university. In a collection of seven articles reproduced from the undergraduate newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, Mansfield treats the clash between Harvard and the Trump administration: he covers Harvard’s unsteady self-conception as an Ivory Tower, affirmative action for conservatives, free speech and protest speech, and the misconceived division between science and the humanities. Altogether, not confining himself to complaints of injustice, he shows what conservatives might offer to improve American higher education.
In other, varied speeches and articles from 1975 to the present, Mansfield contrasts the new and the old Harvard, setting the stage for the conflict today; offers a reform curriculum for a college with ambition; and studies the insidious effects of rampant grade inflation and the forfeiture of merit-based grading.
In Where Harvard Went Wrong, one professor stands up to a whole faculty, offering arguments rather than evasions and equivocation, and keeping as his lodestar the principle that education must conserve the tradition of learning as well as progress beyond the present. This book is meant for both parties—a guide for conservatives and a gentle, friendly reproach to liberals.