The eminent political philosopher Harvey Mansfield entered Harvard University as a freshman in 1949. With a few interruptions for fellowships, military service, and a stint at UC-Berkeley, that affiliation lasted until 2023, when he retired from teaching in Harvard’s government department. I can say with confidence that no one currently alive is better positioned to comment on the changes that institution has undergone over the last three-quarters of a century. In that span of time, institutional change is inevitable. But as Harvey’s new book—Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears—not all of those changes have been positive.
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As Harvey says in this conversation, recorded during last Friday’s livestream, Harvard has become “an instrument of the left,” where it was once an institution dedicated to truth. Its motto, “Veritas,” has been unofficially abandoned in favor of “Mobilitas,” or change, and specifically a change that favors equality over all other values.
Equality as a political value is indispensable to true democracy. But Harvard’s mission, to educate and prepare future generations of leaders and innovators, is inherently inegalitarian. Where elite institutions are concerned, that is a good thing. Admission to Harvard once served as evidence of a young person’s extraordinary talent and intelligence, which were required in order to meet the school’s demanding standards. Those attributes are not distributed evenly across the population, and Harvard has trumpeted the lengths to which it goes to find and admit students who possess them. To be sure, legacy admissions, class, and influence compromised those standards. But while those factors can tilt admissions committees, from the first day of class on, it was on the students to succeed through their own efforts.
As Harvey reports, that is no longer true, and it hasn’t been for some time. He sees affirmative action and rampant grade inflation as evidence that an overbearing political emphasis on equality—sparked in the 1960s and now consuming Harvard and most other “highly selective” schools—has made the pursuit of truth in the classroom a virtual impossibility. The number of students graduating with 4.0 GPAs has ballooned into a crisis, as a recent report from Harvard documents. The Students for Fair Admissions Supreme Court case demonstrated that efforts to increase “diversity” through affirmative action have created racially discriminatory admissions processes that favor “underrepresented” minorities to the exclusion of more qualified but “overrepresented” members of other identity categories.
As Where Harvard Went Wrong documents, Harvey has been warning of the corrosive effects of such policies for decades, and he’s made little progress. It’s no small irony that things began changing at practically the moment of his retirement. It takes more pressure than one professor can apply to reform an institution like Harvard, but I think Harvey can claim at least a small sliver of credit for sounding the alarm early. Maybe if Harvard had listened back then, the embarrassment and tumult of the last few years—from a loss at the Supreme Court to Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony to the Trump administration’s aggressive interventions—could have been avoided. Harvard prides itself on producing leaders, and it likewise thinks of itself as a leader to the nation’s other universities. It has failed in that role. But as we’re seeing, it’s not too late to turn things around.
