HARV THE MARV

That was our old nickname for Harvey C. Mansfield, my old political philosophy professor at Harvard. The more common nickname was Harvey C-minus Mansfield, because he was such a tough grader. I remember one grading session (I taught as a teaching assistant for several of his wonderful classes) when I sheepishly brought in my stack of student grades. “Are there any of these B-minuses we could turn into C-pluses?” he mischievously asked, a twinkle in his often smiling eyes. In my two years of teaching for him, I only gave out two As. For years, he resisted the rampant grade inflation at Harvard, a process begun, as he bravely points out, when some black students first began being admitted under racial preference guidelines. (Before that, African-American students won their places on their academic merits and had no need for the condescending racism that now passes itself off as affirmative action in most of our universities.) Now, he has accepted that that’s unfair to his own students and has decided to give out two separate grades for his classes – the meaningful one, representing their actual work, and the phony one, representing the new, lowest common denominator standards of Harvard and many other universities, in which 51 percent of students get an A or A-minus. Good for Harvey. The combination of racial sensitivity, the cult of self-esteem, and the decline of serious standards in the humanities have been fatal to meaningful academic standards. And it’s typically ballsy of the man to take it on alone.