On this week’s episode, Harvey Mansfield joins to discuss cancel culture and the woke attitudes pervading college campuses. He’ll delve into his long history at Harvard as well as the evolution of higher education towards activism.
Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University. Mansfield’s many contributions to the study of political philosophy include translations of Machiavelli and Tocqueville, nine books and extensive scholarship on a broad range of subjects, and commentary on contemporary politics.
Transcript
Beverly:
Welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, I’m delighted that Harvey Mansfield joins She Thinks to discuss cancel culture and the woke attitudes pervading college campuses. Harvey C. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of government at Harvard University. His many contributions to the study of political philosophy include translations of Machiavelli and Tocqueville, nine books, and extensive scholarship on a broad range of subjects and commentary on contemporary politics.
Dr. Mansfield, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Harvey:
Well, it’s very good to be here. Thank you.
Beverly:
So, to just start with a little bit of background, I was doing some more research on your bio, and it said that you have been on faculty at Harvard since 1962. So that’s been a while. What has it been like with your time at Harvard University, which typically is not favorable to some of the thinkings and the writings that you have had over the years.
Harvey:
Well, that’s right. So I’ve been here even longer from 1962. I first came to Harvard as a freshman in 1949. So I’ve been at Harvard about 70 years. Spent my life here, in fact. I enjoyed it. It’s a good place to be. And it certainly has developed in those 70 years that I’ve been here. I saw through the turmoil of the late ’60s and the consequential what they called the tenuring of the 1960s radicals, which has changed the political character of Harvard as well as most other American universities. And I’ve seen the coming of coeducation at Harvard, and also the introduction in the 1970s of a much greater influx of African American students. So I’ve seen those things, and right now we’ve come to a kind of climax of what is called the woke culture. That is a culture of activism. The university should be active in the pursuit of justice or social justice they say, although I think all justice is social.
So, in a university can’t just be contemplative. So you could say the mode of Harvard is or has been veritas, which means truth, which is that the university speaks of itself as a place where you cultivate the mind. That’s the main point. A student comes here to the college for four years to learn something, but now the purpose is more to do something. And our unofficial motto has changed from veritas to change, and our officials that president talks about, the focus of Harvard and other universities is changing society or is keeping up with change in any case.
So, activism, that is a student should not be studying the whole time, but to take time off from studying and a good deal of time off to promote political causes, and especially to protest. So at the university right now, protesters or to protest is considered a wonderful activity. Protesting is better than free speech. Free speech is making an argument and talking to other people so that they will listen and giving them reasons for the positions that you take. Protesting is walking in the streets or running or demonstrating or there’s a certain unruly character to it, and protest uses mottoes or slogans. There’s no real reason to attach them let’s say. No peace without justice, for example. That’s a complicated proposition. And you try to reduce it just to four words. And you shout it. And all that is activism.
Beverly:
And so, on that, I know I think back when I was in college, I could get extra credit for participating in some type of community events, whether that was elections or volunteering at a nonprofit. Has it now moved into curriculum, part of the curriculum for certain areas of study is mandatory activism? Has activism become part of the curriculum?
Harvey:
Not to any great extent I don’t think. It’s part of the curriculum that it’s justified where people talk about it or the teams and the president urge students to be active in politics. Being at college is not presented as an opportunity to think about things and discuss things with other students. It’s more an opportunity to pick up values. That word is used a lot, values. But that’s what classes have to be devoted to presenting values. Things to believe, not so much things to think about. So it doesn’t get quite as specific as mandatory protesting, but it urges that. And the students do that a lot.
When I first arrived at Harvard, you had to study pretty hard in order to keep up with things. But now although it’s difficult to get into Harvard, once you’re here, the amount of work required is much reduced.
Beverly:
And so, you gave a timeline to start us out on different things that you see in different decades while at Harvard and working at academia. How would you say this activism, this wokeness, another term that we use, how did this become so pervasive and now the prevailing thought that it’s more about feelings and activism than actually getting to truth?
Harvey:
That’s true I think what you said. Well, I think it really begins with the late ’60s and the protest against the Vietnam War and the protest against the universities as custodians of the status quo. The universities know they should be revolutionary even. They should be nonconformists. They should raise doubts about government policies, and classes should be devoted to that. So after the late ’60s, our closet became increasingly politicized. When I was first here, a student wouldn’t know for sure what the politics of the professor was, and there were a kind of mix of Republicans and Democrats. But now there’s no longer a mix. There’s almost zero Republicans on the Harvard faculty, and the Democrats are the most liberal and progressive variety. And each class is permeated with political, indoctrination isn’t quite the term because they don’t teach you things to say or do like a catechism. But it’s all very one-sided. That’s what’s happened.
And now when the politics of the country [inaudible 00:09:24] so polarized, and the politics of the university have become much more concerned and urgent and something you have to do right away. You must convince yourself and others to have all this I’ll call become awake or woke as if you were asleep and suddenly you’re awake. That makes you aware. You don’t have to think. All you have to do is wake up, and that means understand things as it is presented.
You see this first in controversy over race and so-called systemic racism. That the universities want to accuse themselves of and also the rest of society. So they say that America suffers from systemic racism, that is a kind of racism which is so deeply ingrained in us that we hardly realize. If you ask us are we racist, we would say no. Why we oppose racism. Anybody says something which seems to be racism will find his career shortened, his reputation gone, and he will definitely not be listened to. But it’s still supposed that the racial gap that remains between Blacks and whites and Asians on the other hand is a fault of America, of our society.
You see this, show this at Harvard in controversy over the word master. This happened three-four years ago. I use it as an example because it’s in a way so silly. Harvard dormitories are called houses, and Yale has the same thing, colleges. And in both places, the head of the college or the house was called a master. Harvard suddenly decided, and Yale did at the same time, that the word master meant a slave master. This was a kind of justification of slavery to designate the head of a house or a college. It’s ridiculous. The word master also means the master of something, to be well-versed. So same as what’s the conductor of a symphony called? Maestro. That’s just Italian for master. What kind of degree do you get after you get a bachelor’s degree? A master’s degree. That doesn’t mean you’re a slave master.
So, this sort of infantilizing this silly objection was enforced on the universities, and they quickly and eagerly almost changed the name of the head of the houses to something else, some kind of dean. So this is an example of the conformity of view that you get in the major… Well, not just major, but all American colleges and universities right now.
Beverly:
And so, with this conformity, so the fact that vigorous debate and discussion about issues doesn’t seem to be allowed anymore. So take the issue of race for instance. If somebody wants to present a different view or have a dialogue about this, it seems that it’s shut down more than encouraged. And this is what’s been concerning to me is the assuming ill-will by the person who may have a different opinion. That they obviously have bad intentions that they don’t agree with you. What does that lead to with even within an ivy league university like Harvard when vigorous debate is not encouraged? What does that mean for the young people learning? What does that mean for what you call veritas truth to begin with if we stop debating and discussing issues?
Harvey:
It means that our society has transformed into a kind of despotism, which there’s only one way to think and only one way therefore to act. And that there can’t be different parties or factions or opinions. It can’t be diversity of thought. So the university today speak of diversity all the time. By that they mean people who wear skirts and have different color skin, diverse in that way, in those ways which don’t have too much to do with cultivation of the mind. And not diversity of thought. So diversity in race and sex comes out to mean lack of diversity in thinking. So it kind of seeds this unthinking partisanship.
Now the universities are almost all on the left, on the side of the Democrats. So in that way, they make themselves unacceptable almost for the rest of the country, which our country is pretty evenly divided between two parties. If you look at the last half century of presidents, we’ve gone back and forth from one party to the other. And [inaudible 00:16:12] half and half. So what the universities are doing is turning their backs on the half the country and gratuitously, making themselves obnoxious. And you see this too that they’re beginning to be taxed. Harvard has gotten taxed, and they also are beginning to attract adverse action from Department of Justice and the Department of Education.
So, the other side, listen to this and wonders what does the university have for me? And instead of taking this as a way to or a reason to rethink what we’re doing, what happens as the university becomes still more engaged in themselves, still more partisan on one side of all the issues.
Beverly:
I was just going to say what has this meant for you personally. So you’re somebody who does encourage rigorous debate. So being at Harvard as long as you have, what have you faced? I know you’ve been disinvited to speak when you’ve been invited at other colleges before. Is this something that you have to defend on a regular basis, this idea that challenging the mind is an important thing?
Harvey:
I have to defend it every day. Yeah, I have the experience of being disinvited to Concordia College in Canada where I was going to give a commencement talk, and they found out that I had opinions that they didn’t like. So they disinvited me pretending that, oh well, this is just the beginning of an invitation. They had formally issued the invitation. They didn’t apologize. I mean, that’s kind of an insult. It is an insult. But didn’t really bother me.
What bothers me more is just the daily one-sidedness of discussion in universities now. I had a student, young woman from Iran in my class two years ago, and she told me, she said this, she said, “In Iran, you have to be very careful about what you say in public. But it’s pretty free to say what you want in private. Here in America,” and then she said, “And especially at Harvard, it’s the other way around.” So students have a kind of very cautious life. They’re afraid to express themselves unless they are on the most extreme end of progressive thinking.
Beverly:
And I wanted… Yeah.
Harvey:
I see this, yeah, I hate it.
Beverly:
And one of the questions I had for you, so obviously IWF stands for Independent Women’s Forum. So we try to work on policies and initiatives that help women out there. I thought something that was really interesting, in 2019, you wrote in a Wall Street Journal op ed that, “When you die, I wish it said…” So this is a quote, “When I die, I wish it said that I gave my best to my female students.” What do you mean by that quote?
Harvey:
Yeah. Many of my best students have been women. It’s true. I tried to give them my best in the sense that they’re different. They think a little bit differently, even though when it comes to political philosophy, which is what I teach, there’s no feminine or masculine point of view. They face the challenge of living under an extreme feminism in the university today. You can see that feminism in the great controversies they’re having over transgender sex, transgender people. The genuine feminist you might say, those who are really biologically women, are worried that the transgender folks will come and take away the privileges or the advantages that are afforded to women. For example, women sports. So transgender male who wants to be a woman can enter a woman’s sport and win easily because he’s really a male.
Now it’s interesting that feminism has a long history. In the 19th century, the feminists all believed that women were different. Women were better than men. They were more moral. But in the 20th century, feminism said that women are not different. Women are not only equal to men, but they’re the same as men. And so one consequence of being the same as men is that there’s not much difference between them, a man and a woman. And if you want to declare being born a man that you’re really a woman, your identity is in the other sex. There’s nothing that ought to stand in your way.
So, women are really under kind of interdiction. They’re not allowed to be women as women, and yet they’re not satisfied with annotation men. So that I think is a peculiar situation, especially of educated women today. They don’t whether to be equal or to be women. And therefore to be equal means not be a woman. It means to imitate men, do what they do. And not to be a man seems to be… That means you’re accepting less and a life of being the second sex. So it’s difficult for women these days.
Beverly:
Yeah. One of the things I’ve seen just in my working career, and I’ve worked in DC for 20 years now, is when I first came to DC, seen that women were encouraged to wear kind of the boxy suit to dress similar to men. And just from a fashion statement that women wear dresses now, more feminine, but still are leading companies and doing amazing things in politics and business. I feel like there is this switch that women are allowed to be uniquely female but also still be treated equally in the workplace. I just wanted to comment on that that I’ve seen the change in a positive direction over the years. But I agree with you there is that big concern about biological men who identify as women entering things like sports because there are physical differences between men and women. So I find that area just fascinating.
The last question I have for you I think when it comes to higher education and academia, the pandemic has changed so much. A lot of young people aren’t even able to meet in person, in classes anymore. There’s the online world. There’s also the rising cost of college tuition. And when you add to that what we’ve been talking about, that is this activism and wokeness that we see on college campuses, do you think that we are going to see a decline in attendance in higher education due to all these factors?
Harvey:
I mean, we may well see that decline, yes, because it doesn’t seem… It’s certainly not worth it to pay $70,000 to sit at home and take your classes on Zoom. That doesn’t make sense. So a lot of students are essentially taking the year off, whether they’re actually enrolled or not. And it turns out that being with yourself for a year, or for what looks like a year, isn’t a very good way to live. They’re bored. This maybe one of the factors behind the protests in the streets. The students don’t have much to do right now, and they went to college so to speak in order to get away from home. And now they’re back at home or they’re some other place. But they’re very much on their own. It forces each person into a kind of individualized existence, and you feel small. You feel as if there’s nothing important about me, nothing interesting that I can do. And you’re sort of at a loss and flailing around. And the whole experience of college seems to be spoiled in so far as the virus is still with us.
So, whether this will have long lasting effects, I think it may well. Just the technical possibility of teaching courses online instead of in a classroom. But let me tell you, online is definitely very inferior to a classroom.
Beverly:
And I think it’s hard for, especially hard for teachers, professors as well. But we thank you for joining us virtually for our audio podcast today. No video involved, but we had audio. And we just want to personally thank you for the work that you’ve done over the years and also to stand up for diversity of thought and encouraging people to still continue in vigorous debate and that that is a vital part of society.
So, thank you so much for your work and also for joining us on She Thinks today.
Harvey:
It’s been my pleasure.
Beverly:
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