TDR Interview: Harvey Mansfield: Men and Manliness Explained
By S. Matthew McDonald | Friday, October 21, 2005
The Dartmouth Review: Professor Mansfield, you've commented that the only gentleman left on college campuses are either gay or conservative. Where did you first make this observation?
Harvey Mansfield: It was a wise crack, it wasn't an observation. I think I made it in an article I wrote for the Harvard Crimson. It was a bit exaggerated of course, but what I meant was that the idea of being a gentleman is so old-fashioned that gays have a certain manner—a certain appreciation of manner—that I think they share with conservatives. Otherwise they have very little in common, at least in the opinions of most gays.
TDR: Do you think that this attitude is only fleeting, or is it indicative of a widespread social pattern?
HM: It is certainly indicative of a social pattern. I think today we live within a gender-neutral society, in which your sex is supposed to matter as little as possible and the gentleman is definitely a sex role. So to be a gentleman is to be something of a retro or someone backwards, and in our gender-neutral society as it is now you're implying an attitude of disregard or even disdain or resistance.
TDR: Do you think such an attitude is perpetuated mainly by the media?
HM: Well behind the media are the intellectuals, and I think the media almost always take their cue from intellectuals and intellectuals are very impressed still by feminism today. I think a lot of woman have backed away from it, seeing that it is not doing them as much good as was promised. In principle it is very powerful to claim something as a privilege of your sex or even the duty of your sex. It is an easy way to get yourself attacked.
TDR: Do you think that is because of feminism's goal to achieve equal rights and when they realized that it wouldn't work out so well, they tried to back away from that claim?
HM: Feminism was originally an attack of femininity, surprisingly enough. The first main book of American feminism was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and that was written more against the way women behave than against the way men behave. The way men behave was bad to the extent that they excluded women from the privileges of men, which implies that the men have a better deal in life than women. So feminism was really kind of friendly to men or manliness because the women merely wanted the same thing for rights or duties.
TDR: You talk about how being a gentleman is seen as being retro or of the past. Do you think that gallantry is now something of the past, and if so, what do we do to stop that trend?
HM: There are lots of instances of gallantry. Even small courtesies like opening a door for a woman—but it isn't any longer the age of gallantry, or what Edmund Burke called "the Age of Chivalry." This was in his reflections on the French Revolution, where he spoke of Marie Antoinette. When she was abused by the French revolutionaries, he said, "now the Age of Chivalry is gone." There was a time when 10,000 men would have pulled out their swords to defend her, but now that time is no longer. Overall I think there is, in the nature of man, a desire expressed in different ways to protect people that are weaker and that includes women, also children—but especially women.
TDR: Now what do you think the modern definition of masculinity is?
HM: Well, the modern definition, isn't so much a definition as a construction. They start from the old definition and say that it doesn't amount to much. The people who are said to be manly or think they're manly are really just afraid. They are afraid, instead of being confident about, the way they look. They are actually afraid that their male identity is being challenged, or is unsafe or may disappear. In other words, they are afraid of being gay. So a person who makes a point of his masculinity, or manliness as I would call it, is overconfident and actually afraid of being the opposite.
TDR: You have commented about the modern sexual playing field especially in college, and how it is shifted more heavily toward the men than ever before. Why is this the case after forty years or more of feminist struggles for equal rights?
HM: Feminists would say that a very good thing we invented is the double standard in sexual morality, which was a standard that held women to a higher level of behavior than men. So I think that they would believe that now the playing field is level, and that's better for women. I think what's happened in fact is that women are at a disadvantage when they cannot claim to be modest as women. They have a lot more difficulty saying no than they might want to in a situation where there's no other reason they can give except perjury.So I think they are much more vulnerable than they used to be, there are fewer social protections for a woman who wants, not even to say no, but to make a careful choice.
TDR: You are rather well-known for your comments on grade inflation your students received two grades, the one you give to the registrar and the one they really deserve. Now don't you think that is in some regard giving in to grade inflation and have you found your students value their real grade?
HM: Yes. I thought when I tried this they would all hate me for telling them what they really deserve, but they rather laughed the first time I presented it and I don't think they minded that very much; it was very useful information. With grade inflation, it is very hard to learn what you're good at and not so good at because you don't get an indication from the grades where you might go to develop your strengths, which is one of the main thing you want to learn when you're at college. I actually only did the two-grade system one year. I stopped doing it because Harvard got a president, Larry Summers, who took grade inflation seriously. Even though nothing much has been done yet, at least he's talking and others are talking against it. Fifty-one percent of Harvard students have A or A- averages and 91% graduated with honors. We've done something about the honors so that it's a little over fifty percent but we haven't done much about the actual grades. But I stopped with the two-grade system because of the very reason you give a grade, I didn't want to be part of the problem.
TDR: Now how would you respond to the supporters of grade inflation who say that "the high grades should be going up because of the higher caliber of students coming in?"
HM: I question that the students are of higher caliber. I don't think that the SAT scores support that; they have shown a little bit of increase but then they made the test a little easier too. So just from among the students I've seen over most of the time I've been teaching, there hasn't been that much of a change in quality. There was a big change just as I was in college in the 1940s when colleges stopped taking rich kids with families who had gone to Harvard or Dartmouth or wherever, took more high school kids and made a good effort to go outside the region to get a better and more diverse pool of students. The other big change of course has been the introduction of women, blacks and Asians. So there has been a definite change in the character of the students, but I wouldn't say that as students they're smarter or better. The difference is that at a place like Dartmouth, most of the students received very good grades in high school; but when you come to college you're taking a step up, you're in the major leagues now, so you ought to be compared at a higher level with other students who received very good grades in high school. I think that the best schools—the most demanding schools —should have a higher standard than high school, and they shouldn't leave their students in a situation where they don't know what they're good at. When so many are placed in a kind of glob in the top half, or even two-thirds of their graduating class, the necessary distinctions cannot be made.
TDR: Now you mention that due to the diversification of the pool of students there has been a slight increase in the quality of students. You also mentioned before that you believe there is a link to grade inflation and affirmative action and that instruction. Can you expand on that?
HM: This is a point I made growing out of a personal observation. I don't think there's ever been a study of this but I was at Harvard in the late '60s when grade inflation was getting started and that was at the same time as the influx of black students there. I could see that the white professors were very unwilling to give a C to a black kid who was coming in. If they weren't doing that then it seemed only fair not to give the C's to the white kids either. This is just one factor. There are other factors as well, like the Vietnam War the protests against which the faculty sympathized with at that time. There was a system of deferments where you might lose your deferment from the Army if you got too low grades. One of them was this, I think it's often underestimated how much whites—and this applies to conservatives as well as liberals—want blacks to succeed in our country. There is racism—that's for sure—but there's also an awful lot of good will and I think that's because there's a general recognition that our country is not based on race, it's based the princple on all men are created equal, that principle. So if it turns out that one race is unequal that's enough to outset a reproach to our whole way of life and to our whole principle and so I think this may be a sort of good reason why there's grade inflation, because people are sort of pulling for the success of the various minorities.
TDR: Do you think that successful minorities would be bettered if they were forced to raise themselves to that upper level and not be given that assistance, though?
HM: I do. I think that affirmative action and grade inflation are not good for black students or black people in general. It supports the theory that they're inferior and that's why when you make an affirmative action appointment you never announce it as such. So you have to kind of keep it quiet and that means that it is a kind of underhanded program that cannot justify itself. Even at the same time people talk about it and we have a kind of moral confusion about it, and moral confusion arises from a principle that your mother tells you: that two wrongs don't make a right. It's as simple as that. And there are all kinds of arguments for special circumstances—in black sections of town you might want black police, so that it does not seem as the law belongs to whites. But in general if you hold to that two wrongs don't make a right idea you go much more to the right.
TDR: Can you talk a little bit about Lawrence Summers and then the whole thing about women in science and that whole talk and even though there might be some cognitive science that kind of agrees with what he said. Can you talk about that a little bit?
HM: Larry Summers gave a speech to a project meeting in which he raised the possibility that women were not as naturally inclined to science as men and suggested studies of this kind that should be carried on. Actually, there are already studies, he was probably just being more cautious, and he's probably right in what he believes— that women aren't as good at science as men. That's just a common sense observation anyone can make, any person who's been a teacher. It relates especially to women's aptitude at mathematics, which is not that different from men's at the top.
TDR: Don't you think it's a little odd that so many of the scholars who would study this sort of material were so quick to condemn him when they really should have known from their own field that it's true? Now do you think that's just an opportunity to take a shot at the president or…?
HM: For some it was, yes, but I think that this issue was the main impulse behind the obviation of Larry Summers—because that's what they really did, they did their best to humiliate him. So he's a man of first manners, he's very smart, he's an economist and he believes in reason. So you can convince him if you've got a reason that he thinks is good. It is possible to persuade him, he's not a bully, but he comes across as a little unsympathetic if your reasons don't look good to him. So he made a number of unnecessary enemies on the Harvard campus, and they all jumped on him when this opportunity arose.
TDR: How do you see education moving forward as more and more people are applying and it is getting more competitive and more difficult. The acceptance rates are going down and it seems to be a dilution of the pool, because everyone is starting their SATs earlier and earlier everyone's taking the AP exams. It seems like the quality is being compromised because everyone wants the same spot. How do you think the educational industry should react to that and what's going to happen in the future?
HM: We have a meritocracy. It isn't just a gender-neutral society but also it's a meritocratic one that depends on brains and on tests of all kinds that you take to get into college and even after college to get a job. We believe in tests and we believe in our ability to gauge the differences of talent, perhaps more than we should. We believe in talent more than we believe in character and there is a kind of privilege that comes from merit, or meritocracy, that is quite brutal and unsympathetic to people who don't seem to measure up. As you grow older, or as I grow older, especially since I live among a lot of people who are smart, I've grown more and more to appreciate the genius of character and so I'm more and more doubtful that pure meritocracy is the way to go. So the conservative argument that it's against the principle of merit, that's true, but you can't carry that too far. Who ever thought that society could be based on merit alone? There's a very good book that was written by a Harvard student called Privilege [see TDR 4/8/2005], it came out about a year ago and it's about his experiences as an undergraduate. He weaves his own life at college very nicely into major themes and problems of American education and he has his doubts about a society based on pure merit alone.
TDR: So do you think that SATs should go out the door?
HM: No, we use merit to prevent an aristocracy of wealth. Pure merit, undiluted merit, should not overcome character. For instance, I see no problem in legacy admissions which I'm sure exist at Dartmouth, as they do at Harvard. By the way, at Harvard we're beginning to see a number of black students who are legacies, children of parents from the '60s and '70s; so that advantage is being spread around a little bit.
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