What Happened To Harvard? with Harvey Mansfield

 Lee Smith welcomes renowned political philosopher, Harvard professor, and author Harvey Mansfield for a candid conversation about the decline of one of America’s most influential institutions. Drawing from his latest book, Where Harvard Went Wrong, Mansfield reflects on more than seven decades at Harvard and explains how the university gradually shifted from a place of intellectual diversity to one increasingly shaped by political activism, ideological conformity, and institutional groupthink.

Throughout the episode, Smith and Mansfield examine the cultural and political forces that transformed higher education, from the student rebellions of the 1960s to the rise of modern campus activism. The discussion explores Harvard’s recent controversies, including leadership failures, declining public trust, grade inflation, antisemitism concerns, and the growing divide between academic elites and the broader American public. While acknowledging the serious challenges facing Harvard and other universities, Mansfield also offers a measured assessment of the path forward and why restoring intellectual balance remains essential to the future of higher education in America.

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Transcript

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From the brave roots of our founding, to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future. Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing America's most famous educational institution, Harvard University. And we're asking how Harvard lost its way. Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. It began as a small college to train clergy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was later named after John Harvard, an early benefactor. Over time, Harvard evolved into one of the most prestigious universities in the world, known for its research, global influence, and academic excellence. The faculty has included scores of influential thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom helped shape American philosophy. There was also psychologist B. F. Skinner, who transformed the study of behavior, and Henry Kissinger has influenced U.S. foreign policy for more than half a century. And even today, scholars such as Stephen Pinker have contributed to major intellectual debates. Harvard's alumni are equally notable. Eight U.S. presidents attended the university, including John F. Kennedy. Leaders in business and technology such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg also studied there. And yet, in recent years, something's gone wrong. Harvard has seemingly prioritized politics over education, in particular, leftist politics. The university has put itself at the center of debates over DEI programs, which emphasize identity over merit. Instead of breaking new ground by challenging conventional wisdom, Harvard instead institutionalized exactly the sort of conventional wisdom about race, gender, and politics promoted throughout the media. Harvard's problems became especially evident during the presidency of Claudine Gay, Harvard's first African-American president. She was alleged to have plagiarized work for her dissertation and subsequent scholarly articles. And it was under Gay's leadership that Harvard saw wide-scale protests in support of Hamas's brutal October 7, 2023 attack that left 1,200 dead in Israel. At a congressional hearing, Gay played down the university's anti-Semitism problem. The resulting tumult forced her to step down in early 2024. Yet, Harvard continues to face legal challenges related to anti-Semitism. In 2025, the university reached a settlement with Jewish students who accused it of failing to protect them. At the same time, Harvard has been in an ongoing dispute with the Donald Trump administration regarding antisemitism. The government has accused the university of civil rights violations, froze its funding, and filed lawsuits. Harvard challenged these actions in court, and while there has been speculation about a possible settlement, no final agreement has been confirmed. Our guest today is Harvey Mansfield. He first stepped onto the Harvard campus as a student in 1949 and has rarely left since. He joined Harvard's faculty in 1962 and retired in 2023. Mansfield is the author of many books, including volumes on Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and manliness. His most recent book is Where Harvard Went Wrong. 50 years of commentary that fell on deaf ears. Harvey Mansfield, thank you so much and welcome to Roots, Rights, and Reason. Uh, author of many, many books, but most recently where Harvard Went Wrong. So what happened to America's greatest and most famous uh uh educational institution? Harvard uh is in a fix. It's um being uh uh uh under siege from the Trump administration. It's lost uh a lot of its uh federal funding. Uh and um it's lost a good deal of its reputation. It's lost um its reputation with uh about half of America, the conservative half, which is uh approximately where we are. We're pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and uh Harvard has gone off uh on a tilt to the left. And it's been going on for decades, but it's come to uh uh climax with the appointment of uh Claudine Gay as president in 2023. And she uh was faced with uh uh uh s student groups who protested in favor of Hamas and its uh barbaric savage uh invasion in Israel and and she c couldn't bring herself to denounce it. So she was called to Washington and made a uh a presentation there t and was then questioned by uh Representative Lee Stefanik, who was a Harvard graduate, and uh representative from upstate New York, uh who tried to get her to say something descriptive about Hamas, and Claudine Gay kept uh uh backing off and calling it a matter of context. So uh that uh that didn't go over very well, and uh and then it turned out that uh Claudine Gay had some um plagiarism problems in her background, and in and she had to uh resign, and this was uh um six months after she had taken on the presidency. So here was a president of Harvard, uh together with a couple of other presidents, uh humiliated and shown not to have been able to explain herself and to have uh decided uh to to play uh neutral uh in a situation that uh required some denunciation. She had uh six months before this, when she first announced her presidency, made a distinction about Harvard uh and something new. She said uh we're not going to be the ivory tower anymore. That's obsolete. We're going to be a part of society. Well, this is what it meant to be a part of society. It meant being called to Washington and denounced and uh made to look foolish. So um she uh sort of m made an an exhibition of just how difficult it is for a university to play a partisan part of society. And uh to to rile up one of the two major parties against itself. It's I mean I I I I I don't think I I'm I'm I'm I'm pretty sure that American society is uh the the bulk of American society is not pro-Hamas. I'm I'm quite certain that there are leftist factions that are pro-Hamas, but I don't see how that's being part of society. The subtitle of your book is, you know, explaining how you've been writing about this for you've been warning uh Harvard for 50 years. So Claudine Gay, I guess, in some ways is sort of the uh the apogee of this problem, but it's been going on for a long time. Aaron Ross Powell That's right. She was the culmination of a longtime uh devotion to being a part of society in the sense of taking a partisan side. So what they should have done was to be bipartisan, not equal between maybe Republicans or Democrats, maybe, but at least uh some showing for both parties. But they uh uh not every year they have a commencement w in which uh the university shows off whom it honors and kind of makes makes uh uh uh an exhibition of itself. And uh Harvard for some time has had uh a commencement that looks like the Democratic Convention. There's one uh liberal speaker after the other, uh, with with no attempt at uh not not just known again a conservative or Republican, never. Or almost never. They did have Mayor Bloomberg of uh New York when I'm talking. Yeah. Pretty centrist. Was it like that? I mean, you you you know better than anyone what was it like when you first stepped on campus in 1949? That was a long time ago, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well at that time at that time the uh undergraduates were mostly Republican. Really? Yeah. They uh they were uh uh they they were Republican, but they began to change soon after I arrived. They liked Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate against uh Eisenhower, who was defeated two times. So they um so they didn't get off to a good start, but but yes, they're uh they they've become more and more democratic. Of course, the the biggest change was in the late sixties when um the student rebellion took place, the student rebellion against uh the uh uh the war in Vietnam. Even taking the side of the Vietnamese sometimes it was. But uh that that w those were radicals who attacked the university. That hadn't been done before, and attacked the university because they said it was complicit. There were professors who were advising how to defeat the Viet Cong and and these these professors uh deserved to be fired and expelled. So uh and what happened then was uh that gradually the uh those who the radicals who had rebelled in the late sixties got rec graduate degrees, became professors, and got themselves on the faculty. So the so-called uh tenured radicals, as they were called, and and since then uh uh the situation got worse and worse to the point where um eighty, ninety percent uh of Harvard, maybe ninety, uh is on the left. Now that there is a distinction between liberals who were uh sort of uh moderate liberals uh and left. But the trouble is that the uh the liberals look to the left and never to the right for leadership. Well I mean look what you're talking about at least two generations then of faculty. We're starting in the 60s, and then that's one generation, another generation. We're already well into the third generation. So what what hope do these universities have? I mean, I I mean, I I I imagine it's physically uh it's physically impossible for some of these people to uh to even speak to a conservative, someone who had voted for uh uh Ronald Reagan or Mitt Romney even. So what are the chances of of Harvard getting its act together and saying, you know, this is not right. We're we're not here to build um to build the Democratic Party. We're here to train young minds to make them interesting and challenging. And some of the top students at Harvard were people who didn't like Harvard, like Henry Adams. These were people who were on the outskirts. That we need more Henry Adams, people who reject us and everything. Yeah, right. What what are the chances of that happening now into the third generation of uh uh w when it's so deeply embedded in academic culture, especially at Harvard? Well, uh the chances are uh not good, but uh also but they still do exist. Um Har Harvard is essentially stunned, I would say, right now, especially the faculty. They don't see that they've done anything wrong. That's it. They uh they just wonder uh what's happened to them, and they're uh very much uh defending their what they call independence. Independence is ivory tower. Right. Yeah. I mean if you if you want to be independent, you have to stay out of politics if you're a university. Or at least uh if you go into politics, show that you have some kind of balance or bipartisan uh makeup or or wears to show. So um so so the faculty is is stunned and um uh the it the faculty is divided between the scientists and the uh humanists and social scientists. And the scientists are different because their work requires them to keep a lab which costs a lot of money. So any American university that wants to do science as it's practiced today uh needs federal funding because the university couldn't anywhere come near, not even Harvard with its lot of money, with its fifty-six uh billion dollar endowment, can can afford to pay for uh modern science. So the scientists are looking for some kind of uh negotiation and bargain with the Trump administration and they uh they're likely to uh push or try to push the university in that direction. And that might require uh Harvard to uh to take uh some some uh um so some steps toward uh pleasing Donald Trump. And they have started to do that in some regards. For example, right now they're considering to do they're deciding to do something about the great inflation, the silly policy of giving everybody an A. Yeah. First you look at at try to dissolve uh try to discern everybody's merit in order to admit a student, and then when it arrives, you sort of speak, you throw merit out the window, and suddenly it doesn't matter. As long as you got in, you get an A. Well, I've heard people describe there's too much at stake once you've invested in a Harvard student. You have too much at too much at stake in making that person fail or actually study hard because you're sort of admitting you may have made a mistake by admitting them in the first place. Aaron Ross Powell Well, that might be one yeah, one consideration, sure. So um so great inflation, and they've also tried to um begin to hire some uh conservative professors. It's right now just a plan, and nothing has actually been done. Uh and uh otherwise, too, uh they've taken measures against uh the anti-Semitism of the protesters in favor of Hamas. Aaron Powell I mean they they they lost a lawsuit or they had to settle a lawsuit, didn't they, against Jewish students and they did. They did. There's uh been a great uh drop in the number of Jewish students among the undergraduates. Used to be around 15, 18 percent, and now it's just seven percent. Wow. So the I mean this this kind of this goes back to pre pre-World War II uh It does. Pre-World War II numbers because the admissions were were uh restricted. Trevor Burrus There are fewer Jews now than there were in the 1930s. Yeah. Shameful. Yeah, that it is shameful. Do you do do you think that foreign funding plays a role in um both both some of the activism on campus and and plays a role in shaping the curriculum? I guess um the the the the top names that people tend to speak about are are the People's Republic of China and Qatar. Do you think that that uh that that that that plays much of a role? Um It does. Uh they have tried to get a lot more uh international students recently. Probably part of that is just being uh sort of globalism that it's that our our country needs to uh be nicey nicey to the rest of the world. And so we need to uh bring bring uh a greater number of them over here. Part of uh diversity. Um and um and then of course it's money. You're right. That uh those people are more likely to uh pay full fare and um not come with uh with scholarship aid, although some of them do. I mean it's it's it's sort of terrible because I'm I'm I'm uh I recall, I'm old enough to recall when people hated Harvard because they envied it, um, because it was such a fantastic institution. Whenever you hear I mean, I'd growing up, I'd go to parties in New York and be split between, you know, the Harvard man and the the the Yale man, and yeah, it was ridiculous. But you grow up l learning to despise the IVs because they're proud, because they've done something important and they haven't done. But now it seems that people are contemptuous of it because of the disarray that so much of it's fallen into. And there are still people, of course, who will go to parties and the same Harvard man. And it's it's it's certainly not the same sort of prestige 30, 40 years ago. Will that I mean we actually all hope, right? People on the right as well as people on the left should hope that Harvard uh restores its its its its its significance, not just its academic prestige, but also uh but also its its cultural significance to the United States. I mean, this is a major American institution. So uh we're hopeful that will happen. Yeah. Well, you're uh what you talk about is it referred to in at Harvard as dropping the H-bomb. That that uh all students, anyone as associated with Harvard is always reluctant to admit it because it's really now there's another reason for not dropping the H-bomb, you're ashamed of it. Instead of possible to be under pressure by other academic institutions uh to to restore, to restore itself to its place, you know, in the in in in the gap in the in in the solar system of education, whether it's I know a lot of people are coming to southern schools as well to avoid those things. So that's true. A Vanderbilt, a Hillsdale. Yeah. You know, that have to happen. So Harvard would say, look, we have to compete. We're losing all of the real good students to Vanderbilt or Hillsdale or St. John's College. Yeah, right. Those are good places you've made. Yeah. So uh well that hasn't happened yet, but uh it it could. And the main thing is that uh that our reputation has been dragged through the mud. And uh and uh pe people just, as you said, don't think very highly of us. And and it's uh and that's very striking. That's something new. It's a bad, new, bad experience that uh especially the faculty are now feeling. You know, I I I take your book, which is which is really important because it's uh it's also kind of a great uh it's sort of a great abridged cultural history uh about Harvard and what we've For the last several decades. But also I find I find it very moving because again, knowing how much time you spent there, how much you've given to that institution, how many other uh how other people have given so much to it, it's I I I mean it's very sad, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And it the book isn't simply about Harvard, though all the facts come about from Harvard, but Harvard isn't that different. It maybe it's this still the top university, maybe it isn't. Maybe Yale or Princeton or Chicago. Aren't they having the same problem? But they're having the same problem as uh as Harvard. And and and it doesn't it isn't confined to the major university. Even small colleges feel this uh woke um uh uh fog that uh settles over the territory and makes it hard to see anything or to do anything. I mean it's just it's it's terrible because uh you just d split before the science and the humanities, and while there is still obviously important research coming out of the science departments of these great universities, what's happening in the humanities is absolutely insane. I mean you can go through a a bookshelf every once in a while and find something interesting, but I mean if the you know the literature departments, I mean I I I scan sometimes the I mean hard to find a course on Shakespeare. Right. Yeah. Things like that. Well, actually the scientists are are pretty woke as well. They've fallen for a lot of that nonsense. Well, I don't want to end on an entirely dark note because this is Let's not do that. I didn't I didn't mean to be so depressing, but I I but uh but what I want to do is I want to salute you on an absolutely fantastic career, most of it, you know, most of it at Cambridge, at Harvard, and the different books that you've written. I mean, I remember uh well your book on manliness. I can't remember that was that was 2006, 2010. And I remember how much, you know, that that must have been exciting to get a lot of, you know, you I mean, you write about Machiavelli, you write about Tocqueville, and but here you're writing about manliness, and you're right in the middle of all these different cultural debates. So I really want to salute your fantastic career. Uh that's good of you, Lee. That's that's very good of let me say one thing at the end. Harvard right right now has a very good president named Alan Garber, and he is in a very difficult situation, and I think doing a very good job. I think that our audience should pull for him and pull for Harvard. And and we get back to the point where we hate Harvard because it's doing so well, because it's producing fant not just fantastic scholarship, but great Americans too. And that's what we need to get back to. Harvey, you uh you've written so many books. What what are you working on right now? I'm writing a book on Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. It's uh a book for children, but also for adults, and I'm gonna try to show it's also for philosophers. Huh. How is that? That'll be a trick. Can you give us a little uh a little tease how it's how it's also for philosophers? The famous scene in which he puts out a fire in the Queen's bedroom by uh um using uh his his manly force, put it that way, to douse the flames is a picture of Swift's satire. He's trying to divert people's attention from the bad modern uh thoughts and philosophy that has just arrived on the scene. Fascinating. Uh that sounds great. I uh congratulations and we'll look forward to reading it. All right.