On Higher Education

Dr. Harvey Mansfield, a distinguished professor of government at Harvard, and a graduate of Harvard College himself, is a serious scholar who demands a lot of his students, a fact that earned him the nickname Harvey “C-minus” Mansfield. The push for “grade inflation” from both the faculty and the administration led him to propose a new grading system that would surely satisfy everyone: namely, that each student should receive two course grades.

The first grade would build the ego and satisfy Mom and Dad, and the second, somewhat lower no doubt, would be an honest assessment of the student’s accomplishments. His "modest proposal" published in The Wall Street Journal, provoked both howls and cheers, much to his own delight and the consternation of students and faculty, not only at Harvard but on college campuses all across the country.



On Shaky Ground



When I met with Dr. Mansfield at his office in Littauer Hall on the Harvard campus, I asked what the fallout of his modest proposal for double-grading had been. “Well, it was essentially a publicity stunt,” he said, “and it worked. It was intended to draw attention to grading practices, and despite the fact that this over-grading has been going on for decades, it’s true that a lot of professors and students didn’t realize the extent to which we were compromised by it. We have been giving about half A’s and A-minuses. It’s incredible!”

I said it would probably be more noticeable at another university where the SAT score of the average student is somewhat lower. “That’s one of the excuses we hear,” he said, “but when I first came to Harvard as a 17-year-old freshman, I realized I was suddenly in the big leagues. It wasn’t going to be like high school anymore. But nowadays it’s more like a continuation of high school, because you still get the same high grades you got before.”

The trick is getting in, I said. “That’s right. The trick is getting in " What about the level of general knowledge among entering freshman, I asked, how does it compare to when you came here as an undergraduate? “Oh, that’s very shaky. They’re better in math and science than in my time, but they don’t know much history, and they haven’t had much practice in writing. The effect of that is compensated somewhat by the fact that many of them have natural talent — they’re smart kids and they catch on quickly — but they have large gaps in their knowledge." They catch on quickly if they take the right courses, but since there are few requirements and no mandatory survey courses, a lot of them apparently don’t.

The course catalog is enormous, I said. I don’t know how students manage it. “That’s true,” he said. “There’s such a variety of courses; they’re scattered all over the place, and there’s a vast range of choice despite the fact that we have a core curriculum, which amounts to about a year’s worth of courses. Nonetheless, there are so many ways of satisfying the requirements that you don’t have to take anything important or significant. The core isn’t really a core; it’s really just an approach at one.”

There are required English courses, I understand, but they’re nothing like the survey courses you and I had to take as undergraduates, I said. “That’s exactly right, and the students really miss that. On the other hand, they like taking all these odd things; they’re struck by this or that course title, so they end up with transcripts that are a hodgepodge, with no coherence.” Unless they’re coming back for graduate school, I said, students don’t understand that they haven’t actually learned very much in the course of a four-year education. “I think they know,” he said. “They know the easy courses and they know they could have taken something more challenging. I don’t think they’re really satisfied with what they’ve got. These are smart people so they know when they’ve had it easy.” Recently I spoke to a colleague at a major university who told me he sees some students with SAT scores as low as 300 to 400, far below the typical entrance requirement, but because they’re from one of the preferred minorities they get in. They take mostly junk courses for four years, learn next to nothing, and then graduate along with everybody else. Any way you look at that, it’s unfair to everyone concerned, and not least to the student who knows he hasn’t acquired the knowledge he’ll be expected to demonstrate on the job.

“The shocking thing,” Mansfield said, “is that even Harvard students, who have much higher SAT scores than that, also end up with very imperfect educations. I think that’s why our former university president, Larry Summers, talked so much about restoring some of thoe survey courses that have been greatly missed. He was working on a revision of the undergraduate curriculum, including the core curriculum. And one of the things he mentioned was the lack of survey courses in the humanities.”



Changing Standards Since you’ve been here as a student, grad student, and a faculty member for, gosh, over fifty years, I said, you’re certainly in the best position to tell me what’s up with the curriculum. What’s the impact of the dumbing down that’s been going on over the past thirty or forty years? “Requirements have diminished, very much,” he said, “and the number of courses given has increased. The coherence has been lost. There always was a good deal of choice at Harvard. "We had a president in the nineteenth century, Charles W. Eliot, who set up the so-called elective system, but it’s out of control now. When I came here there were a few easy courses — we called them ‘gut courses’ — athletes and ‘Gentleman’s C’ students took them. But most people looked down on those courses and regarded them with amused contempt. But now the gut courses have proliferated, and they’re regarded as more legitimate than they used to be. It was only with a certain amount of embarrassment that you’d tell someone that you were taking one of those, and everybody would know you were taking it easy. But now the attitude toward those courses has changed.”

What about academics? I asked. What are your concerns? “The lack of core courses that reflect some deliberation by the faculty about what’s important for an educated person to know,” he said. “I would say that’s the number one thing.” But does the politically correct view of ‘dead white European males’ militate against that? “Yes, it militates against it ever happening so long as the professors now in charge remain in charge. But, as I say, I believe that their beliefs are being shaken, and they will be shaken even further.

"Consequently, I think they can be led — or maybe in some cases coerced — into a more disciplined education. On the other hand, political correctness isn’t retreating yet, even though it’s not believed as fervently as it used to be.” I’m glad to hear that there are going to be changes to the core curriculum, I said, and that it may soon become more comprehensive and rigorous, but the current core is pretty fluffy, seems to me. “Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s a core that consists of approaches. So students learn the historical approach — for example, or the social-science approach — they don’t learn what’s the most important history or which literary works, for example, are considered to be the greatest books and authors.” Who’s to say? I said, with a laugh. “That’s what students say to me whenever I bring up the subject of ‘great literature.’ I asked one young man if he had been exposed to the great books and he reacted almost in shock. ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘We don’t talk about great anything!’

You have to wonder what students are learning when their professors refuse to say that anything is great or a classic. The view is that all works of literature are of essentially equal value. Frankly, I’m shocked to hear that my graduate degree field of comparative literature has one of the worst.” “Yes, it is. It’s one of the worst,” Dr. Mansfield said. “And the romance languages are about the same, along with sociology. Government, on the whole, is one of the better ones. Economics is also one of the better ones at Harvard. But the humanities — especially comparative literature, English, and languages — those are all pretty bad.”



Making the System Work



Despite the mayhew that has been waged on college campuses over the past forty years, Dr. Mansfield still believes it’s important not to lose hope altogether. "The knowledge is still there to be had," he said, "and there are teachers who are still authentic and dedicated to the profession. I would say that to the parents of children who are coming to college. It’s still possible to get an education; there are a few mavericks around, especially at the larger schools.

"There are still a few decent and honest professors. In the smaller colleges I think the situation may actually be worse, because there the faculty all know each other and hiring is done more on the basis of potential friendships or sharing of opinions than it is here. But you have to look for those things, and you have to make your wishes clear. Parents have a lot more power than they realize, if they will only use it to get people to listen to their concerns.”

For education to work at any level, as Professor Mansfield makes clear, there must be standards. At the elementary and secondary school levels, students have to develop skills in the fundamentals that will allow them to acquire the kinds of knowledge they’ll need, not just for successful university careers but to become good citizens. For those who are headed for the job market, there must be sufficient mastery of the language and computational skills they’ll need to hold a job. And those admitted to colleges have to be able to perform at a reasonably high level of academic competency if the term “higher education” is ever to have any meaning.