For more than fifty years, Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. has challenged progressive orthodoxy within and outside of the academy. A political theorist of the first rank, he is also a seasoned practitioner of traditional political science. The latter is an approach inspired by Aristotle’s Politics that takes its bearings from the perspective of citizens and statesmen, and never simply leaves that perspective behind. To cite another of Mansfield’s intellectual inspirations, Alexis de Tocqueville, such an approach aims to see “not differently but further than the parties.”This combination gives Mansfield’s work a remarkable depth, breadth, and relevance.

　　As a political scientist, Mansfield has defended what he terms America’s “constitutional soul,” opposed the hyper-democratic impulse to level vitally important distinctions, and manfully resisted the totalitarian impulse at home and abroad, including the ravages caused in recent years by the secular religion of “wokeness.” Through his teaching and his own example, he has demonstrated that excellence and equality need not be at war with each other, that liberal democracy, properly tutored, can open itself to what is highest in human beings and to what is highest simply.

　　In our partisan divisions, Mansfield is a self-proclaimed conservative precisely because he is a principled advocate of “liberalism with soul,” a liberalism open to, and dialectically dependent on, an older and richer “conservative” wisdom. In his judgment, liberalism needs conservatism to be the best version of itself. This is particularly true of his home for many decades, the liberal university. Today, the liberal university (if it can even be said to still be a living reality) needs to be “bipartisan” before it can become “non-partisan” again. So he argues in his wise, instructive, and feisty new book, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears, a collection of essays and addresses to his alma mater over the decades.

　　Mansfield attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and received all his advanced degrees from the same institution, and he taught in the Department of Government for nearly sixty years before his retirement in 2023. Harvard is his intellectual home, and he only wishes it well. He roots for Harvard, so to speak, and not just at sporting events.

　　While he clearly cherishes the university at its best, he sees its traditions of merit and achievement, and its old ideal of the disinterested search for truth, in remarkably short supply in recent decades. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, an ill-defined and coercive commitment to diversity and inclusion, oblivious to genuine political and intellectual diversity, or to civic pluralism, not to mention elementary truth-seeking, has replaced “Veritas” as the effectual truth of an education at Harvard.

　　The Ivy League Assault on Normalcy

　　In the preface to Where Harvard Went Wrong, Mansfield reports attending the 2025 Harvard commencement, where he watched his granddaughter graduate. The pageantry was resplendent, the academic robes bright, the pomp and circumstance memorable and impressive. But there was also an unmistakable element of groupthink on display. Whether delivered by administrators or graduating students, the speeches all “intoned the talk of the left-wing of the Democratic Party,” monotonously so. The implication was clear: No other perspectives are worthy of consideration, not even of refutation. Honorary degrees all went to people on the left, “all speaking to the goals and practices of diversity and the opinions of the left.”

　　Instead of an ivory tower, Harvard now sees itself as “part of society,” but the part of society that repudiates “normalcy” and any real attachment to an imperfect but still good and free country. Harvard has no place for the other parts of the country, or even of the academic world, that do not share the project of cultural repudiation or the drive for thoroughgoing societal transformation. Even its “moderates,” and its serious scholars, offer no real resistance to these projects.

　　The ideological “wooden language” that once reigned supreme behind the Iron Curtain now takes the form of an obligatory, and soulless, incantation of “race, class, or gender,” or “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

　　To begin to rectify the situation, Mansfield proposes “to make the university bipartisan, open to both parties and their contrasting—I would say contradictory—views.” Conservatives, broadly understood, need to be represented in the academy again, perhaps not equally at first, but at least represented. The charade that “diversity” thrives when ideological uniformity and conformity is the rule, must be exposed for what it is—a massive obfuscation at the service of a more-or-less unified transformative project. There is a problem when there are far more students at Harvard who sympathize with Hamas, an organization that “savagely raped and murdered Israeli citizens,” than there are conservatives of any stripe. This is the problem Mansfield wants addressed.

　　To their credit, after his retirement in the fall of 2023 at the age of 91, the editors of the Harvard Crimson (Harvard’s mainstream student newspaper) invited Professor Mansfield to write seven op-eds explaining where things went wrong at Harvard from a conservative point of view. All are reproduced in this volume, and all are gems sparkling with insight and wit expressed in lapidary prose. In his first essay, Mansfield points out that conservatives are so little known at Harvard, except as targets of vitriol, that he will have to begin by laying out the essential partisan differences (in the classic Aristotelian sense) in America. Present-day American “liberals” reject inequality in all its forms and advocate “diversity” and compassion, apparently without limit. Conservatives, in contrast, believe that inequalities must necessarily accompany and indeed should help inform the precious achievement that is civic equality. In this way, conservatives can teach less doctrinaire liberals to “look up,” to learn how to admire achievement again, and, more deeply, to see what is grand and good in the human capacity to admire what is truly admirable.

　　In a second essay, Mansfield highlights the multiple ways in which an institution like Harvard takes pointed aim at the “distinctions between man and woman, educated and ignorant, honest and criminal, [and] more generally, differences of quality and quantity,” distinctions readily accepted by ordinary people uninitiated in the ways of the academy. Such norms, rooted in common sense and the millennial experience of peoples and nations, are dismissed as “mere arbitrary decisions” that must be replaced by a new “normal” where, among other things, transgenderism and the soup of pronouns that accompany gender ideology become the new norm and are rigorously enforced. Mansfield notes that the left is not wrong that President Trump has challenged some “norms of civility” that have served us well as a social order. But he has also defended vital norms, rooted in common sense and experience, that have come under systematic assault from the regnant progressive orthodoxy. Both sides of the coin must be recognized.

　　Closing Off the Questions

　　In another essay, Mansfield points out that the deconstructive Left long ago repudiated the primacy of speech and reason (the logos of Greek philosophy and New Testament theology) as the ultimate and indispensable academic and human “norm.” They prefer “free expression,” which need not persuade or convince anyone, to the reasoned debate and disputation made possible by free speech. Expression in and of itself has no “purpose or limit,” as Francis Canavan pointed out many years ago in his book Freedom of Expression: Purpose as Limit, and is perfectly compatible with loud voices, angry shrieks, campus “occupations” and even sympathy for unabashed terrorists and totalitarians. Non-stop protests undermine the debate and disputation that are part and parcel of the life of the mind and the liberal university rightly understood. At the same time, they give universities “a bad name in the public” and thus undermine their legitimacy. They invite clumsy intervention by politicians such as Trump, who understandably do not want the body politic to become a thoroughly corrupted byproduct of higher education run awry. Nor is this an idle possibility. As Andrew Sullivan quipped in the summer of 2020, we all live on college campus now.

　　Constant, clamorous, and threatening protests are “inappropriate where free speech reigns.” Free speech, in the form of the best noble rhetoric (think of Pericles, Lincoln, Martin Luther King), reveals human logos at work. It invites us to “participate,” however incompletely or inadequately, in the quest for truth on both the civic and intellectual planes.

　　In that vein, Mansfield shows how academic feminists regularly appeal to “consciousness raising” rather than canons of evidence and argumentation. This is perhaps best demonstrated in their responses to those who deny that “male” and “female” are mere social constructions or that differences in aptitude, interests, and emotional make-up between men and women are solely the product of unjust social structures. Ideologists, as Eric Voegelin put it (the reference is my own, not Mansfield’s), are those who refuse or ban “Socratic interrogation,” who won’t allow relevant questions from being addressed or even asked in the first place. Mansfield and Voegelin are very much in agreement on this score.

　　In one of his interventions before the Harvard Faculty in 1984, addressing plans to create a concentration in “Women’s Studies” at the university, Mansfield asked pointedly, if civilly, why women’s perspectives are presumed to be exhausted by feminist perspectives? Are upper-middle-class white women really the victims of oppression in the manner of American blacks who suffered from real racism and discrimination, and some of whose ancestors were indeed subjected to the injustice and savagery of chattel slavery? Why, Mansfield asked, are thoughtful critics of feminism—George Gilder, Midge Decter, Phyllis Schlafly, to name some writers and thinkers prominent at the time—never included on the reading lists of such programs? Marx, Freud, and de Beauvoir are everywhere to be found—and later more radical “queer theorists” and “critical race” theorists were added to the canon. But authentic greats such as Plato, Aristophanes, Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton are ignored, or when condescended to, subject to crude and dismissive “deconstruction.” This is hardly a credible “discipline” worthy of respect.

　　Citizens in search of practical wisdom will find in Mansfield’s book a treasure trove of insights about how to restore a liberal education worthy of the name.

　　The closing off of the questions is evident in a host of disciplines and new pseudo-disciplines. Mansfield also takes aim at the regnant scientism at elite universities. Science deals with numbers, with the impersonal as such, while the humanities, which in better times might have corrected this one-sided emphasis, ridicule the very notion of ensouled persons endowed with reason and free will. Moreover, scientists, so central to the university in its latest STEM incarnation, cannot give the vast non-scientific part of the public a convincing account of why it ought to be funded in the first place in the face of legitimate or expressed moral and civic concerns. Nor can these same scientists, bereft of philosophical wisdom and thus of any account of the good as such, give a compelling account of why the scientific enterprise is choice-worthy in the first place. The dominant relativism in the humanities hardly helps in this regard. Meanwhile, scientists and the medical profession flirt (or more) with wokeness, bandying about tyrannical ideological clichés that have nothing to do with truth. Some even encourage experiments with young people who suffer from sexual dysphoria.

　　The ideological “wooden language” that once reigned supreme behind the Iron Curtain now takes the form of an obligatory, and soulless, incantation of “race, class, or gender,” or “diversity, inclusion, and equity.” To these can be added the various “anti-colonial” and anti-Semitic tropes that are increasingly de rigueur on elite college campuses today. Here too, the enduring and soul-enriching “Socratic” questions are closed off. Ideological dominance occurs because “bipartisanship,” and thus the natural civic framework for debate and discussion, or even lively contestation, does not exist in the first place. In its place, an incoherent mixture of scientism and ideology reigns supreme. Who suffers? All those who were hoping to get a glimpse of the life of the mind at work at the most prestigious (and most amply financially endowed) university in the world.

　　Once again, “Women’s Studies” remains a major culprit in this regard, with unchallenged—and unchallengeable—ideological presuppositions taking the place of vigorous Socratic questioning. Young women in particular deserve better than a crude and dogmatic “anti-essentialist” ideology that cannot give a coherent account of what women are, that confuses the indignity (and worse) of prostitution with legitimate “sex work.” As Mansfield puts it, true feminism should seek to “elevate women,” and not “obscure them.” It should welcome the efforts of men who “strive to be gentlemen worthy of the admiration by women.” In striking contrast to the status quo, Mansfield maintains that “Harvard women need a definition of women to sustain their dignity and equality.” Equality without substantive content, dignity, and self-control is an invitation to guaranteed unhappiness and social strife.

　　Towards Renewal

　　As one would expect from Harvey “C-” Mansfield—as students have nicknamed him for quite a few years—he repeatedly takes aim at grade inflation and the affirmative action programs which provided its initial impetus. These were, as he tells us, “the two lost causes” he “espoused as an annoying Socratic gadfly, seemingly to no avail. Mansfield in no way belittles Harvard’s black students who are, he says, of a high quality and can take care of themselves. But giving half the students at Harvard some variant of an “A” undermines excellence and makes a mockery of any claim that an institution such as Harvard still respects the old meritocratic ideal. Moreover, Mansfield quotes Thomas Hobbes to excellent effect: “Glory is like Honour, if all men have it, no man hath it.” “A high grade that everyone gets is no longer high.” It becomes an entitlement or an exercise in satisfying therapeutic self-esteem.

　　Harvard, it seems, is finally waking up to the problem of grade inflation, no doubt spurred on in some part by Professor Mansfield’s indefatigable efforts. But the university’s larger “worldview” will arguably undermine serious and much-needed efforts to overcome it. In his conclusion to his essay on grade inflation, Mansfield, at once the political philosopher and thoughtful citizen, gets to the heart of the matter:

　　Wisdom says that democracy works only by adopting certain inequalities of excellence to qualify its main principle of equality. To expose them, professors must grade sensibly.

　　There is much more in store for the reader in this book that bravely challenges what George Orwell once called “smelly little orthodoxies.” In addition to the themes and topics already discussed, in his speeches before the Harvard faculty, Mansfield takes aim at political double standards, chides Harvard for honoring second-rate female prime ministers while ignoring Margaret Thatcher, and defends the presence of ROTC at Harvard. He also makes the case for a serious core where political and military history are studied, languages learned, philosophy and religion are engaged, Western civilization is treated with respect, not contempt, and where beautiful things are cherished and cultivated.

　　Liberals will feel challenged, perhaps even exasperated by, Harvey Mansfield’s dogged insistence on old truths and the virtues of a truly liberal university. The woke will undoubtedly dismiss him as a “reactionary” rather than exercising the “logos” to respond to him with arguments of their own. But citizens in search of practical wisdom will find in Mansfield’s book a treasure trove of insights about how to restore a liberal education worthy of the name.