Harvey Mansfield

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Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught for more than forty years. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and in 2004 he received the National Humanities Medal. He is the author of studies of Aristotle, Burke, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Hobbes, constitutional government, and most recently, manliness. He is a self-described Straussian, and some of his most notable students include Andrew Sullivan,^[1] Alan Keyes, Bill Kristol ^[2], Nathan Tarcov, Clifford Orwin, Mark Blitz, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Arthur Melzer and Jerry Weinberger.

1 Controversy
2 The Ironic Grade
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Controversy

Mansfield is an outspoken conservative. In 2006 he drew controversy for an article he wrote in the Weekly Standard defending President George W. Bush's use of domestic surveillance in the War on Terror.[3]

[edit] The Ironic Grade

Mansfield is well-known for his opposition to grade inflation, which he claims has plagued Harvard's pedagogy. In response, he has created a system known as "the ironic grade" in order to at once: (1) fight grade inflation on an individual by not distributing high marks, (2) not hurting his students through significantly low marks, and (3) gaining media attention for his anti-inflationary cause. At the end of the semester, Professor Mansfield assigns to each students two grades, one deserved and one undeserved. The undeserved grade is necessarily better than the deserved grade, and conforms to the ordinary Harvard curve of approximately 25% A's, 25% A-'s, 20% B+'s, 15% B's, etc. Only the undeserved grade (the higher grade) is reported to the registrar to be placed on the transcript; however, students are individually given their deserved (and often very low) grades, which usually center around a C or C-minus, thus earning him the nickname Harvey C-Minus Mansfield.

[edit] Bibliography

Statesmanship and Party Government (1965)
Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders : A Study of the Discourses on Livy (1979)
The Spirit of Liberalism (1979)
America's Constitutional Soul (1991)
Taming the Prince : The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (1993)
Machiavelli's Virtue (1996)
A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy (Isi Guides to the Major Disciplines) (2001)
Manliness (2006)

[edit] References

^ "[1]Provocations", Andrew Sullivan, The New Republic Online, posted January 19, 2005, accessed June 16, 2006.
^ "[2] We Had A Secret Handshake Too", FrontPage Magazine posted August 22, 2005, accessed June 16, 2006.