condition versus cause

Colin Kidd:

Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One particular cause of ire is grade inflation, which he blames on greater racial diversity in the student body.

Untrue and unjust. His actual position is more reasonable and more interesting. Mansfield believes that back in the Sixties, when Harvard first began pursuing racial diversity in its student body, the (almost exclusively white) professoriate were reluctant to give low grades to any Black students. Some were sympathetic to students who might have felt out of place in an Ivy League environment; others were simply afraid of being called racists. But whatever the reason, a significant percentage of Harvard faculty raised the grades of all Black students. However, they understood that this practice opened them to charges of reverse racism, so they raised the grades of white students also.

(By the way, there really was a major change in Harvard’s admissions policies during this era: in the mid-Sixties, Black students made up about 1% of the enrollment in Harvard College; by 1970 it was 10%.)

Mansfield’s argument is not that a racially diverse student body caused grade inflation, but rather that it was a key condition for grade inflation. The cause was the response of the faculty to this condition, a response which Mansfield believes to have been unnecessary and counterproductive.

I don’t know whether this argument is correct or not, but it is his argument. It’s worth noting that Mansfield began teaching at Harvard in 1962, so he was there when it happened.

Still, it seems to me that Mansfield is overlooking a factor that was far more important than racial diversity. During that same period (the late Sixties and early Seventies) young American men enrolled in universities could defer being drafted into the military as long as they remained students in good standing. Very few faculty wanted to be responsible for sending young men to their deaths, so, since Harvard College in this era was still male-only, it became virtually impossible for anyone to get a grade below C, even if he did almost no work. Surely this situation made it difficult for professors to give low grades to any student, however mediocre, who actually did the work faithfully. What in an earlier time would have been an F became a C; what would have been a C became a B+ or A.

That’s my explanation for grade inflation at Harvard during the period Mansfield is concerned with. But I wasn’t there, and, again, Mansfield was. So take that into consideration.

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In most respects Kidd’s account is pretty fair to Mansfield, and even to the Straussian belief in a great tradition of esoteric writing. (If you’ve read Arthur M. Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines, as Kidd has, you simply cannot dismiss the argument that esotericism is widespread in the history of philosophy.) But just when I thought Kidd was going to give us a serious critique of Straussianism, the piece stopped. It’s around 3000 words, and what I really wanted here was one of those 8000-word explorations that the LRB is famous for. (Of course, if Perry Anderson had written it would’ve been 15,000 words. I don’t need that.)