The Dispatch Podcast - Going After Harvard Corp. | Interview: Harvey Mansfield

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

Political philosopher and former Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield joins Jamie to trace the academic roots of wokeness. Also: —The plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay; —Trump, Biden, or the alternatives; and —Campaigns against grade inflation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 60 years until he retired in 2023, Harvey Mansfield taught political philosophy at Harvard University, where from much of that time, he was in contention for the top or at least most famous conservative professor in America. While at Harvard, he mentored students who became national figures from Alan Keyes to Bill Crystal, to Andrew Sullivan, to Tom Cotton, to my former college advisor and former guest on the dispatch podcast, Jeremy Rabkin. Mansfield has written books on McAvelli, Burke, de Tocqueville, and manliness, among other subjects. And at 91, he is still publishing, or at least as I understand it, trying to write one or more books. As you imagine, he also has opinions on what is going on on college campuses and in the national political scene. So we get into all of that and much more in this very interesting podcast that I think you will very much enjoy. Without further ado, I give you, Professor Harvey Mansfield. Professor Harvey Mansfield, welcome to the Dispatch podcast.

Glad to be here. Professor, I want to start where I started last week. We had Robbie George on the podcast talking about some of the same issues that I want to discuss with you. And I began by asking him to imagine if he, was, instead of Professor Robbie George, Princeton President Robbie George, and in the same case with you, imagine if you were Harvard President Harvey Mansfield, sitting before Congress like several of the presidents did just a few weeks ago and were asked, is calling for the genocide of Jews harassment? How should they have answered? First, by saying that this was an atrocity committed

by Hamas against Israel, against Jews. It was an attack on their honor, going after their babies and their women trying to show that they couldn't defend their citizens, and to do so behaving like barbaric savages, quite uncivilized. So I would have begun with some statement of that type, to give an overall flavor to what would come. I don't think I would have used the word context. It's true that context in the sense of circumstances matter, but context isn't always complex. It can be simple, and in an act of this sort and one's reaction to it, But the overall impression that needs to be left is that it was simply an atrocity.

So I think the three sisters, presidents of universities, are able to give this notion. Until just earlier this year, or if this airs in the beginning of next year, until the mid-2020-3, you had been teaching at Harvard for 60 years or maybe just over 60 years. A lot of people seeing what the president said just a few weeks ago are wondering, what is going on on campuses? Can you explain to those who might not understand how three very highly educated, very powerful academics could fail to answer what seemed to be a pretty easy question about condemning the calling for the genocide of Jews on campus? What is going on? It goes by the name of woke. That's kind of repeat of the term political correctness, so the 1980s, and it refers to the atmosphere of all of America's main universities, and especially the most prestigious

ones. So woke means you've waked up from your complacency or your self-satisfaction. This is the way the woke people want you to think. They want you to believe that nothing is given. There's no nature, no biology that you have to accept. You can be yourself as you wish. So woke is a politics of identity. Now, it used to be that your ID was what you as an individual are.

But now identity means the identity that you make for yourself. You identify your identity and your identity. And that's, I think, the fundamental principle by which universities are operating now. This woke owes a good deal to feminism. Feminism began as an attack on the notion that women have a nature, a nature that they are given and that they cannot change. So this was Simone de Beauvoir a long time ago, wrote a book called The Second Sex, in which he said that a woman is an historical construction and not a natural fact.

So women, in order to go from the second sex to the first sex, have to understand themselves as constructed, and therefore they are free to construct anew for themselves. And this means that there is no essence, there's no definition, you can have things as you wish. So the universities now, I think, are dominated by that general view, that there is no definition. We see that feminism has had this strange conclusion

where a nominee for the Supreme Court says she doesn't know what a woman is, even though she was appointed explicitly for being a woman in part, a black woman. So this is what they think. They don't believe that Harvard say, I'm going to talk about mostly about Harvard, because that's where I come from, has a tradition that is given to us, but it's a tradition that we are free to make over for ourselves. So one of the most recent accomplishments if you want to call it that, Claudine Gay, the present president of Harvard, was to appoint a committee which decided that Harvard had a legacy of slavery, that there are many, or at least not many, a number of incidents in which before slavery was abolished in America, had slaves or had commerce with slavery in some minor way or not. So Harvard has the legacy of slavery. Now, if you go to Harvard, you see that there's a place called Memorial Hall.

That's the largest and the most conspicuous building in the university. The Memorial Hall is a memorial to the dead of the Civil War on the Union side who were Harvard graduates. That's the legacy of anti-slavery. Claudine Gay and her committee wanted to take over this anti-slavery. legacy, which is the fact, and turn it into the opposite, a legacy of slavery. So woke gives you the power, if you're in power, to change names and to alter historical circumstances. If you're at Princeton, to forget that Woodrow Wilson was the president of Princeton, if you're at Harvard to forget that John Winthrop,

the person for whom Winthrop House, one of the dormitories, was named, was a Puritan founding father, was something that to be ashamed of and not proud of. So woke is a kind of an attack on what is given and a re-identifying it as evil if it contributed to something that the progressive regard is wrong. That's what is in general going on in America's

universities. Can I ask you, Professor, Bill Buckley wrote, you know, 60 or so years ago, 70 years ago, God and Man at Yale and talked about a left-wing takeover academia. I went to college 20 years ago, and it certainly was not conservative. It was certainly most of the professors there at Cornell were left of center. Is what we're seeing on campus. now new from your experience? Is this a new type of kind of left-wing ideology, or is it a continuation? I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what we're seeing a different, different than what we have seen just typically left-wing academics in the last 30, 40, 50 years? This is a reappearance of the new left of the late 60s, I would say. It's true that before that

there was a kind of takeover by liberals from Republicans or Conservatives. I graduated from Harvard in 1953, and just about at that time, Harvard was turning from Republican or conservative to Democrat or liberal. But those liberals were what you would call Cold War liberals. My father was a professor, and he was a liberal of that type. A liberal had no liking for communism or socialism, but who fell out the politics of the New Deal? Now, when the new left came in in the late 60s, its main target was precisely those people. It was not attacking conservatives. It was really attacking liberals. Liberals were in charge of the Vietnam War. That's John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

They were complicit in the war which was America was carrying on against communism and Vietnam. The new left at that time was mainly attacking other liberals who were moderate and non-communist. They redefined the left. They made it from something Marxist to something that was a kind of combination of, of Marx and Nietzsche, of right and left, and which gave a certain willfulness and focused on consciousness, the way you think. You were not determined by the way you produce,

that's Marxism, but you were determined by the way that you think as if thinking or consciousness were the most important thing. And this was picked up, especially by feminists after the late 60s in the 1970s and their project was to raise consciousness and so what you see in the woke today is the present-day confirmation and success of that particular project people I think underestimate the power of feminism that the new left it now which was done by males mostly white males, has become more of a feminist project, and therefore it concentrates on the way you

think and especially the way you talk pronouns. The pronouns that you use have to be not those which are given to us in grammar books, but ones which we create and make. For example, MS was created by feminists in order to give women an identity that didn't say whether they were married or not. If you say Mrs., that means you're defining yourself as your relationship to a man. So MS as an example. And then they want to make sure that all impersonal pronouns have no reference to males. So a doctor is not a he, a doctor is a he or she, or better to say, They, that's what they do now. Turn a plural pronoun.

So this is a small thing in a way, but it's also a very everyday thing. And this is what is being taking over at the universities. Can I ask you, Professor, what percentage of, there's been some articles that have come out since, I guess, the testimony where some people at Harvard were embarrassed, where it talks about professors not willing to give their name, but critical of this ideology that has swept campus. What percentage are silent sufferers of this ideology among your fellow professors who, you know, oppose kind of the direction of this ideological movement but don't want to speak up against it versus those who are, you know, subscribers to what you're talking about? It's hard to say, but, I mean, if you're silent, you're in a sense subscribing, it doesn't do much good to be silent. There is now at Harvard a group called the Council for Academic Freedom at Harvard, which was organized by a psychology professor Stephen Pinker and a former medical school dean, Jeffrey Flyer, which has managed to gather together about 150, maybe 200 Harvard faculty, which is actually a small fraction of the total, if you consider not just the faculty. arts and sciences, but also all the professional schools. But it's a significant number, and I think it is opposing the takeover of Harvard by Woke. Then the great majority of Harvard is liberal.

These 150 even are not conservatives. There aren't that many conservatives, but it's liberals who are upset at what is now being considered liberalism are. progressivism. So there's that group, and then there's, as you say, those who are silent, and then those who are actually proponents of woke. And it's hard to say whether the silent woke or those who are silent about woke are a large number or not, because after all, they're silent. How can this be combated? Can it be combated? Is it? too far along. I mentioned Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale. His solution back then was for the trustees to step in. How can you bring back the Harvard of old, the Harvard that you probably might

have been more proud of than the face of Harvard that we're seeing now? We would have to do something about the Harvard Corporation. The Harvard Corporation is in the hands of the woke. There is not a single plain liberal among them. They're all progressives, a dozen people. And they're led by Penny Pritzker, the darling of Woke, who wanted to make a transformation of Harvard by appointing Claudine Gay. This is her pet project, which is blown up in her face. She wanted to set aside Claudine Gay when she got her appointment, said openly that she wanted to get away from the ivory tower notion of a university.

that's a university as something which is detached from politics and become, quote, a functioning part of society. Functioning part of society turned out to mean having to face Elise Stefonic in Washington and answer her questions. That was a debacle for the three presidents who went there. So that's, I think, the doing of the Harvard Corporation. It's more they than Claudine Gay, who are responsible for the present situation. So you're not going to get any help from them, as they are.

If by some pressure or reaction or insurrection against their domination and their choices, then perhaps one could do something. So what Harvard has set itself up to do now is to battle against the Republican Party. The Republicans have discovered that they have very little to find useful or helpful at Harvard. And so they've taken notice. And it isn't just at least Stephanic, it's others too.

There's quite a number of Harvard graduates in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. One of your former students, I know Tom Cotton is a U.S. senator. It would be an example. Yeah, sure. So if, you know, that kind of pressure from alumni and also from the donors, by the way, Penny Prisker is a billionaire donor or so. Billionaire donors are not always against the corporation. and there's one of them, at least, who's on it and is an advocate of woe. So some kind of combination of political pressure, alumni pressure,

and just a realization that Harvard is demeaning itself by becoming a political instrument. There have to be a number of those Harvard people that are willing to rise up against this. Speaking of Claudine Gay, again, you were a heralded professor for 60 years at Harvard, have you had an opportunity to look at the allegations of plagiarism against her, and do you find them credible? I do find them credible. I think it takes more of an expert on plagiarism to discover it than you would think. And so I agree with some of those who wonder whether this isn't really plagiarism, but something else. And there are also degrees of severity in plagiarism.

But generally speaking, plagiarism means borrowing the language of somebody else without attribution. And that's what she did. If you were advising someone who had a child about to go to college, would you advise them to go to an Ivy League university to go to Harvard today? Yes. Yes, there's a lot of good at Harvard, especially the other students. And there's a lot of prestige and authority from having gone there that is worth holding on to or taking advantage of. Harvard shouldn't be abolished and people shouldn't worry about not going there.

Once there, you should think and behave differently from most of the students now. now. Most of the students at Harvard now have been miseducated in high school and in prep school. Again, once again, the more prestigious the prep school, the worse it is with regard to woke. So first, there needs to be some re-education of students as they enter. Who's going to do that? Well, not so much the faculty, but I think other students, It looks as if the game may be changing. In this past year, Woke has exposed itself. And it's hard to think that the debacle that we've seen at Harvard and other places will be allowed to continue.

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use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or don't. domain. Professor, if you allow me, if I could turn just kind of the broader political moment in the political scene, I had read that you, in 2016, you wrote in Mike Pence, you couldn't vote for Trump. In 2020, you voted for Trump after January 6th, you said you can't imagine voting for Trump and that you may even be open to voting for Biden if the race was between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Is that where you stand today? Would that be the first Democratic presidential candidate you would have voted for in your lifetime? That wouldn't still. In my lifetime, no. I was, I voted for Adley-Stevenson, if you

couldn't believe it, against Eisenhower. Those were my first votes, I think twice. I voted quite mistaken, I would say now. I'm pretty undecided at the moment. I'm not happy with Biden, and I wouldn't like to give the Democrats another four years in charge of the executive branch. And if I'm forced to vote for Trump, I would have to consider it. But Trump, I despise these contemptible figure, an odious personality, and a very deleterious influence in American politics. Nonetheless, one would have to examine that. Now I'm going to say the word context.

Obviously, a lot of the people who are conservative who would consider not voting for Trump or voting for Joe Biden, the question of the threat Donald Trump poses to our democratic institutions, to our democratic system, how seriously do you take that threat? Is it as big of a threat as some say, or do you think it is less of a threat than some view it. It's a threat not so much to democracy as to constitutional democracy. The constitutional democracy is democracy moderated, especially by institutions and practices and principles that require a majority to be durable and moderate and that don't give immediate power to a majority that could be very narrow.

So that's the difference between democracy, simply understood or purely understood, and democratic constitutionalism or constitutional democracy. That constitution is what keeps us moral and powerful and unconfused. That's a constitution which was made first by our founders, It's been very successful over the years, which is really the most valuable, common possession that we as a people hold. And Trump cares nothing, knows nothing about the Constitution. Another point to make is foreign policy.

It's hard to say whether Biden will be too weak or Trump to... violent. And so one is in a quandary when it comes because I think foreign policy may be the most important issue that we'll be voting on. First of all, expand on that. Why do you think obviously there's a lot going on in the world? Why do you think foreign policy could be the most important issue this election? Well, we have a number one enemy in China and we have number two and number three enemies in Russia and Iran. And our military is not quite as, is not optus enough as things stand after a number of years of, not neglect, but insufficient preparation. So we need to revise and promote our military power of manufacture and of equipment. And we need to

make sure that Ukraine doesn't lose and that Israel can triumph. Those two things. And if we don't, we're going to face serious challenges thereafter. In fact, we're going to face them even if we do, but we'll be much more at a disadvantage than otherwise. So what Biden did when he quit Afghanistan, invited Putin to resume his offenses in Ukraine, we have to do something to make sure that Ukraine does not lose, and which would be a kind of victory. So that's that and defeat or really the elimination of Hamas are two very important foreign policy. objectives. If you could snap your fingers and have a Republican nominee that you liked, who would be the ideal nominee, in your opinion, that you wish that you could go to that ballot

to cast a ballot for this or next November? Well, I would go with either Desantis or Nikki Haley, the two leading alternatives to Trump. One of those two, or perhaps both in combination on a ticket would be much better than Trump and would avoid all possible pitfalls and yet another experience of Donald Trump. One more political question, and then I'll have a few closing questions just that are broader and maybe more a little philosophical. You mentioned that it still looks like it might be Trump versus Biden. There is a third candidate running, who you know.

I was wondering, and I asked this of Robbie George, because he knows. knows him as well. What you make of Cornell West's presidential campaign? He's a great guy. He's a man with a good heart. So I would be delighted to see him lose as a Democratic candidate by a small margin. Let me ask you this question. I read somewhere or maybe it was an interview where you said there are too many professors who are too quick to call a student exceptional or make them feel like they're exceptional. Can you point to who was your most exceptional student during your 60 years teaching? Is there a student that stands out that was the most exceptional student that you taught? No, no, no. I'm like a mother hen. I have all my chicks and I'm not going to single out one

sort of ideal. But look, I will mention this. One of the things I've done is carry on a campaign, very unsuccessful against great inflation in university. That's another contributing factor to the problem that we have now. College is in general too easy. This is certainly the case at Harvard. It's hard to get into Harvard, but once you're there, you're golden. You don't really have to work very hard. The only pressure that you get is really from other students, competition, not from the faculty. So in general, college needs to be made more difficult because it's impossible to make college sufficiently educational if you're giving everybody an A. Easy grading means less, much less work. And that means, too, that

students have all this extra time for extracurriculars. And that's bad. You're not going to college to make a moral triumph. You're going there to cultivate your mind. And so we need to make college curricular harder. That would be one contributing factor to revise our universities. Professor, I'm going to close on these two questions. I used to ask this on my old podcast before coming to the dispatch, but I think for you,

these questions are perfect, which I used to call my closing questions. What historical leader do you most admire? Let's say Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the greatest American, I think, period. He took our deepest problem, and he resolved it, or put us on. the road took the main step in resolving it. The problem of slavery and how to accomplish its defeat. One is an interesting thing and this has been news to a lot of students. Slavery was not abolished in America by the abolitionists. It was more difficult to abolish than simply to oppose it.

you had to get together a majority. America even then was a democracy, and it was ruled by a majority. And how are you going to get a majority of the people to oppose slavery, and especially when it turned out that to oppose it meant to give your life, say, to abolish it, like those people who were memorialized

at Memorial Hall at Harvard. So Lincoln was able to do that. He was able to get a lot of people who opposed slavery weren't willing to fight to defeat it or eliminate it. So how would you do that? And the answer is

if they fought for the union and not simply to abolish slavery. So Lincoln made it happen that with result of defeating slavery, but for the cause of maintaining the American Union. And that was how he was able to bring it off and lead us to victory in the war that he didn't want, and that in a way nobody wanted, but turned out to be necessary. So this was the greatest feat, I would say, in American history. Greatest accomplishment, even greater than the founding of it.

And finally, Professor, can you point to three books that most shaped your worldview? Three books. Well, I am what is called a Straussian, so I'm going to mention Leo Strauss's book, Natural Right, and History. Two more than that. Well, I'll take a book I translated, Machiavelli's Prince. That's shaped my thinking, for sure. And let's say yes, it comes to me as if like a voice from the outer world. Aristotle's Politics, that's the wisest book that was ever written about politics. Mackey Valley's Prince was perhaps the most powerful book. And Lincoln was the man who put them both together.

Professor Harvey Mansfield, thank you so much for joining the Dispatch podcast. My pleasure. You know,