Word: mansfield
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Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 came of age at Harvard as part of the “silent generation,” born between the two world wars, childhoods marked by the Great Depression...
...Mansfield says he was no exception to the complacency that typified the era—he spent his undergraduate years diligently studying and remained at the edges of any political debate. At 18, Mansfield had not yet found the political ideology that would fuel both his academic career and personal credo for the next 50 years...
...know him now as the Kenan professor of government could envision Mansfield as part of this “generation without a cause...
Another alumnus professor who has been equally miffed, though less publicly than Mansfield, with grade inflation. Linguistics Department Chair Jay H. Jasanoff ’63 said, “almost half of undergraduates today do better than I did my best year.” To him, whether or not current students deserve these grades is not a question: “the same degree of smarts now gets higher grades than it did [when I was an undergrad].” So Jasanoff, like many other department chairs, has been pushing his professors to combat grade inflation...
...Quotas are wrong because they are arbitrary and increase the chances that students will get grades lower than what they deserve. Furthermore, they’re not at all necessary to achieving the wider task of raising standards—if that indeed is the goal of people like Mansfield and Jasanoff. There are many classes at Harvard that lack quotas but still have such difficult requirements that few students earn grades...