As both THE SCRAPBOOK and writer Noah Oppenheim have reported here in recent issues, Harvey Mansfield, distinguished professor of government at Harvard and occasional contributor to this magazine, abandoned his long-running guerrilla war against grade inflation earlier this year. Citing figures from the registrar's office that suggested more than half of all grades at the university are A's or A-minuses, Mansfield said he was "tired of punishing my students" and from now on would give them two sets of marks each semester. The accurate one would remain unofficial. Only the other one, jiggered upwards to conform with campus-wide practice, would appear on their transcripts.
Mansfield's move, and the complaint it implied, initially received widespread and favorable notice, including a front-page piece in the Boston Globe that deeply embarrassed Harvard's administration. Things quickly turned sour, though, when Mansfield's faculty-club critics successfully mounted a diversionary counterattack involving -- you guessed it -- a veiled but unmistakable charge of racism.
Grade inflation at Harvard, Mansfield had publicly speculated, was in part a legacy of two late 1960s phenomena: the Vietnam war, when good grades were necessary to maintain an academic exemption from the draft, and affirmative action, the theory of which could not be maintained if its beneficiaries' transcripts were polluted with C's and D's. Mansfield's mention of affirmative action prompted Harvard to wag its finger at him scornfully. "Nothing I have personally observed," university president Neil Rudenstine wrote in reply, "leads me to believe that grade inflation resulted from the enrollment of greater numbers of minority students." Oh dear.
But wait! Late last week, Fifteen Minutes, a weekend magazine supplement of the Harvard Crimson, ran a long analysis of the entire controversy, which concluded, first, that "grade inflation is real," and, second, that "some evidence correlating the influx of black students 30 years ago and higher grades at Harvard does exist." Mansfield's theory "deserves further investigation."
Of course, Fifteen Minutes and the Crimson are independent publications. Harvard's administration is sticking with its idiotic party line: Grades are high there because the average Harvard student performs better than the average Harvard student.
"I think that by far the dominant cause of grade 'inflation' at Harvard," explains Harvard College dean Harry Lewis, "is the application of constant grading standards to the work of ever more talented students." Anyone but a Harvard professor of logic would give Dean Lewis an F.