Harvey Mansfield is a legend—not to say a myth. These days, of course, a conservative on the political-science faculty of an Ivy League college may sound as mythical as a minotaur. Perhaps Harvey’s critics viewed him with the same mixture of astonishment and fear as they would the mythical beast. Unfortunately for them, Harvey was all too real.
When I arrived on campus in the mid-nineties, Harvey had been around for nearly fifty years. Every student knew the legend of Harvey C. Mansfield—or Harvey C- Mansfield, as he was universally known. The first time I went to his office, I grimaced that someone had scratched a minus sign into the nameplate after his middle initial. Since he hadn’t replaced it years later, I can only assume he secretly welcomed this minor act of vandalism.
Harvey Mansfield, “the lone dissenter.” A man who was to the Harvard faculty meeting what Socrates was to Athens. His dissents were the stuff of legend, passed down from one generation of students to the next.
He inveighed against grade inflation for decades, till he finally relented and started giving students two grades: the real grade actually earned and the “ironic” grade sent to the registrar. I suspect all my grades were ironic. Of the apparent increase in the academic abilities and decline in virtue among Harvard’s students, he quipped, “We’ve replaced the gentleman’s C with the non-gentleman’s A-.”
He cautioned that affirmative action would elevate group identity over individual merit. He predicted that its rationale would shift from remedying past discrimination to “diversity”—from a temporary exception to the principle of equal opportunity to a permanent replacement of it.
He warned that Women’s Studies wasn’t even a real discipline and better called feminist studies anyway for how it catered to a small number of peevish women who held a narrow-minded view of their sex. No Plato or Jane Austen for this crowd. And he famously scorned the faculty for their vote to create the major: “Ladies of America, if you want a husband you can push around, marry a Harvard professor!”
He also warned about Environmental Studies, also not a real discipline, but rather socialism under the latest trendy guise. Or, as he later told me, what is modern environmentalism but the pantheism about which Tocqueville warned democratic peoples?
He mocked the faculty for their hypocrisy about ROTC and gays in the military. They nobly sacrificed for high principle when it was their students’ scholarship money at risk. But for their own grants from the Department of Defense? Well, principle can’t buy a vacation home on the Cape.
Although the stuff of legend, Harvey’s dissents continued in my time. He rebuked the administration for its reprehensible invitation to Jiang Zemin, the communist Chinese dictator. A former soldier himself, he stood up for our troops during the Iraq War. He defended quaint notions of due process against Harvard’s Stalinist sex police. He even defended President Larry Summers—a Democrat!
At every turn, his colleagues and the Crimson portrayed Harvey as a hidebound relic. Harvey has said, “they let me talk, but they never listened.” If only they had! Because in retrospect, every legendary dissent has marked him out not as a relic, but as a prophet of the damage his beloved university did to itself. Just months ago, the Supreme Court found Harvard liable for its racist admissions policies. What shame the university should feel—if Harvard professors were capable of shame.
Even still, the lone dissenter was also part myth. Harvey was no reactionary conservative. For those of us who studied with him, he was the opposite of dogmatic or orthodox—which is to say, the opposite of most Harvard professors. This caricature of Harvey truly was a myth.
I once asked him about the story that he nearly left Harvard for Chicago to fill the seat of his good friend, the late Allan Bloom. I imagined that he might feel more at ease among a faculty that, if not exactly conservative, was more sympathetic to his views. He replied, “I could never leave Harvard. Besides, I’d probably be a liberal at Chicago just to be contrarian. Not really, but it would be fun.”
Harvey knew that it was more important, more interesting, and, yes, more fun, to examine, as he put it, “the fundamental principles of philosophy and political philosophy than simply to be conservative politically.” To my knowledge, he never taught a course on mere conservatism.
He didn’t attract many aspiring politicians, very much including young Brooks Brothers Republicans. Not for them the risk of a blemish on their transcript. Besides, what use did they have for James Madison, much less for Aristotle.
No, Harvey tended to attract earnest, inquisitive students of all political stripes. He rewarded those students for taking the plunge by exposing us to political philosophy as a way of life, confronting and grappling with those “fundamental” questions. What is justice? What is virtue? How should I live?
And reminding us in creative ways that these are not academic questions, but as urgent today as when Socrates first called them down from the heavens. Over the years, Harvey struck up a friendship with Miss Manners. He invited her to a session of his seminar on manliness. He grinned as she swatted away complaints about manners and etiquette. One dramatic student objected that manners are inauthentic. Of course, they are, she said: would you like to go through life with everyone saying and doing exactly what they think? A young feminist complained that manners are sexist, what with men opening doors and holding chairs. On the contrary, she answered: those customs reflect a kind of deference, and deference is paid at least to equals, and usually to superiors.
Finally, Harvey levied his own objection: manners are unmanly, because they throw up obstacles and red tape between a man and the object he desires. Having just studied Macbeth and what Harvey called the forms and formalities of constitutional government, I suspect that he meant how political customs or constitutions thwart the ruling designs of men with vaulting ambition. But Miss Manners quizzically asked, “What do you mean, Harvey? Skip the dinner and movie, go straight to the sex?” After a pregnant pause and with an impish grin, he answered, “Not what I had in mind, but good example.”
That was Harvey. Presenting timeless questions in novel ways, challenging his students to see the permanent truths of the human condition not only in old books, but in the world around them.
Far from the mythical conservative, one might even call Harvey a liberal, along the lines of a question he sometimes posed: who today is called a liberal for his manly defense of liberty? Remarkably, to even speak of “liberty” or “freedom” these days is to mark oneself as a conservative.
Whatever it’s called and whether in the faculty room or the lecture hall, Harvey mounted just such a defense of liberty, grounded in the human soul and the highest aspirations of mankind. He called his home back to its noblest traditions and he inspired generations of students to live an examined life.
I’m thankful for the great good fortune of having known and studied with him and I join you tonight in honoring the life and the work of the great Harvey C. Mansfield—the man, the myth, the legend.
