Word: mansfields
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...legal protection. The passive: he said that laws protecting specifically gays would patronize them (an argument Machiavelli sort of makes in his Discourses on Livy). And though the BGLSA (it didn't have a "T" that year) might have hated him, several of its members liked and respected Mansfield personally...
This current spat has gone according to form. Mansfield has been very consistent about grade inflation. He said the same thing in 1993 in Harvard Magazine, at a time when the SAT gap between black admits and white admits was larger than it is now. Mansfield is very savvy, so he must have had some idea that his recent comments would raise a row. They did, courtesy of the e-mail discussion list of the Black Student Association (BSA). Several students, in delightful vituperation, wrote screeds protesting the fact that they even heard the comments, as if such discourse ought...
This performance made valid criticism of Mansfield slightly more difficult to communicate and cleared the high road for him. So did the stand-in, which only had the effect, according to several Government 1061 students, of annoying them and giving Mansfield exactly what he wanted: the chance to appear sober and in the position of responding to an overindulged anger--anger out of proportion to the alleged wrong...
...student who wrote an e-mail to Mansfield forwarded Mansfield's very, very polite response to the BSA list. It almost begged for a meeting. Last week's closed-door discussion was the result. But nobody's mind was changed on the issue at hand. What was the purpose of last Monday's meeting, then, if not a self-affirming exercise for both sides...
...Mansfield's comments are a red herring. Administrators can rightly take him to task for not citing evidence. But they have admitted that the College gives minorities a "plus" in the admissions process--a system that is affirmative action in practice if not in name...