Word: mansfield
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Since neither increasing student aptitude nor smaller classes appear to explain the stunning rise in grades, faculty members have turned to other explanations. Early last year, many at the College were angered when Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53 publicly reasserted his racial theory of grade inflation. Mansfield argued that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “white professors stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well.” But in a Crimson...
...Though Mansfield was proven wrong, there are several more reasonable explanations for why grades have increased. Former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry A. Rosovsky, among others, has postulated that the Vietnam War draft boards of the late 1960s had a significant influence. Faculty members were reluctant to give poor grades to male students because such grades could leave them subject to the gruesome carnage of Southeast Asia. Inflated grades became the moral equivalent of opposition...
...small sector of the conservative Right (namely Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53) is up in arms over the high percentage of high grades given to Harvard students. As is usually the case with anyone to the far left or right of the political norm, Mansfield is so maddeningly conservative that reporters feel compelled to grant him interviews, with the guarantee that he’ll say something infuriating to the general public. And of course, once his quotes began hitting the papers last year, public responses from the Harvard administration were necessary...
...quality of students has not noticeably improved over the last 15 years, have grades risen so much? We believe much of the blame falls, as Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 wrote in an e-mail to Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. ’53, on a “collapse of critical judgment” in evaluating undergraduate coursework. Harvard’s standards have atrophied to the point where mediocre work receives a B, and merely solid work receives an A-minus...
...authors deny, however, that increasing numbers of minority students attending college has contributed to the rise of average grades, an argument that has been made by Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield...