CRB editor Charles R. Kesler recently sat down with Harvey C. Mansfield at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a wide-ranging conversation, the distinguished Harvard professor of government, who retired from teaching last year at age 91, discussed his life, Harvard’s woes, Leo Strauss, Niccolò Machiavelli, the two greatest books on American politics, and more.

CRB: Although you’ve been famous, and to your critics infamous, for decades as Harvard’s only or at least best-known conservative, when you came to Harvard as a freshman in 1949 you were a Democrat. Why were you a Democrat, and what kind of Democrat were you?

HCM: I was a Democrat because my father was a Democrat and my mother too, but especially my father. He was a political scientist who taught at Yale and Columbia and was chairman of the political science department at Ohio State from 1947 to 1959. He was a New Deal Democrat, a liberal who had an aversion to the Left. He was never attracted to the Left, certainly not to Communism, which was in the air in those times. I remember in high school I went to a couple of meetings of the summer program of the Telluride Association run by my uncle, Clarence Yarrow, in Pasadena. He took me in together with a bunch of other students and first presented to me a view of the extreme Left in America. A couple of the speakers were from the embassy of the Soviet Union. But he also brought in Bertram Wolfe, a notable anti-Communist of the time. My uncle was a Quaker, of a political sort; he had been a conscientious objector during World War II. I came out of that summer intern-type experience with an interest in the Soviet Union and with my eyes opened to its evils. I had already met Harry Jaffa in Columbus, a young assistant professor at Ohio State who introduced me to political philosophy and to his own anti-Communist conservative politics. So I had these counteracting impulses at work, my father, my uncle, and Harry Jaffa. I remember so much the dramatic come-from-behind election victory of President Harry Truman in 1948, which pleased my father no end. I participated in his joy, and that was the year before I went to Harvard.

CRB: And what was the political atmosphere at Harvard like then?

HCM: There were Republicans at Harvard, but not what later were called conservatives. For liberals, the big political issue in my four years was what do you think of Alger Hiss? Hiss, later discovered to be a Soviet spy, was the darling of the bien-pensant Left. I started off on the side of Hiss and gradually worked my way to the side of Whittaker Chambers. With new admissions like me, a high school graduate from Ohio, Harvard students had turned majority liberal, both students and faculty. Most all the liberals, but not my father, were on Hiss’s side. I was taken in to some extent by Adlai Stevenson in 1952 as well; the picture of a liberal intellectual he was. Then, however, I met [professor of Government] Samuel Beer in my sophomore year. Beer was an active Democrat, but a big influence on me, as he was on so many. I became his student through my undergraduate and graduate years and his close colleague for the rest of his life. I started as a freshman wanting to be a Soviet expert and began to study Russian. But I quickly realized I didn’t want to spend my life as a scholar reading Communist propaganda. I began switching to political theory. I took Government 1 freshman year, which was half political theory. William Yandell Elliott was the professor, and we read his fat textbook on political theory, which consisted of excerpts culled from the Great Books. That approach is part of the distant past, deservedly! It’s one of the elementary achievements of Leo Strauss to introduce the reading of whole books. He set forth the idea of a book, with an organization and a plan and a movement and rhetoric. The boring parts were actually crucial and therefore not boring.

CRB: Samuel Beer, in his youth, must have been a very dynamic presence.

HCM: Absolutely! He was wonderful. He strode into class wearing his World War II army overcoat. He was cocky, with his red hair and red moustache. With Beer, I was able to avoid those two scholarly tyrants, W. Y. Elliott and Carl Friedrich, who taught Gov 106b [Modern Political Philosophy] which I later inherited from him. Beer was talking about interesting issues that were in tune with the times but very definitely worth studying, like why did the Germans, these cultivated people, fall for Hitler? I picked up Comparative Government, mostly of Western Europe, from Beer. He was both my senior thesis adviser and my dissertation adviser. The department at that time thought that political theory was the most important part of political science, but it didn’t quite know why, or how to present it to students.

CRB: What was your senior thesis topic?

HCM: It was called “A Theory of Parties.” Not worth the paper it was typed on, I’m afraid. In those days you had to hire a typist. As a junior or senior I had a brief love affair with Max Weber that issued in this concern with a theory of parties, based on his three types of “legitimate authority.” Beer had helped to introduce me to Weber’s importance.

CRB: Was your dissertation, which became your first book, Statesmanship and Party Government [published by University of Chicago Press in 1965], an extension of this concern with a theory of parties?

HCM: Yes, though it was more of an answer to a question that Leo Strauss had actually posed to me about the respectability of parties—that was my big point that no one else had studied. That before one could have a party system or party government one had to show the necessity of it and that it could be considered respectable, both of which had been argued in a pamphlet by Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. Party is still not totally respectable. It’s good to have political harmony, especially in a republic, and political parties are a good way to disrupt that. This is the anti-party argument Burke spoke against. Later I studied Machiavelli, who put forth the idea that disruption is good for a free state.

CRB: Having arrived at Harvard as an Adlai Stevenson Democrat, when and why did you become a Republican?

HCM: I can’t remember if I voted for Stevenson again in 1956. I think I did, though I can hardly believe I voted for him twice! I changed parties just after that, and the main issue was foreign policy and Communism. I decided that the Democrats were “soft on Communism,” a phrase used at that time. I got back from the army in 1956 and was in my first year of graduate school.

CRB: Was it the egghead thing? He was a graduate of Princeton, after all.

HCM: I’d forgotten that, Princeton. That should have warned me, too.

CRB: Harry Jaffa, since you mentioned him, became a Republican around 1960, or 1962 at the latest, also because of foreign policy concerns.

HCM: He was very influential for me, on foreign policy. Harry was a violent opponent of Communism, meaning he would beat you up if you weren’t on the right side of the question.

CRB: Did your service in the Army have an effect on you and your political opinions?

HCM: I served one year in Virginia, after my basic training in Arkansas—where I became acquainted with the dawn, because the Army always got you up before dawn—and one year in France. It was kind of boring, because I arrived, luckily, after the fighting in Korea had stopped. During that war, the Army had discovered the enemy’s ability to brainwash American prisoners. So they decided they had to do something to prevent that by acquainting American soldiers with the history of their country and of the U.S. Army and its battles. Some Harvard guys I had met when being processed into the service contrived to award me a wholly imaginary master’s degree, which entitled me to be included among “scientific and professional personnel,” so later on I gave lectures to the troops using materials that the Department of Defense had sent around. I learned to stand on my own two feet and shout—“sounding off” to the troops, something I hadn’t done before. I spoke as a private and a college graduate, to an audience containing many sergeants, half of whom were black, who had been in Korea and who knew what war was, and I didn’t know fiddle-de-dee about that. They listened to me, at best, with amusement, or with barely concealed disdain.

Thanks to the desegregation of the Army, which Truman had ordered, I had the experience of living with black folks in a way most white Americans hadn’t in those days, and I kind of liked them. Sergeant, you know, is a crucial rank in the military. The officer says, “Get this done.” The sergeant actually has to know his men, choose which ones will do it, and be fair and observant. Those black sergeants were good guys.

The Army also taught me to make my bed every morning and to stay in shape. Those two things stayed with me for the rest of my life. And as a professor when advising freshmen I always told them to make their bed every day, because it’s a downer to come home to an unmade bed. Two other points of advice to freshmen were: make friends and acquaintances, because in college is where you have the best opportunity to meet a diversity of abilities and interests. And go to the doctor when you are ill; don’t try to tough it out, particularly since you pay for it. The last was directed to tough-guy freshmen who didn’t want to feel weak.

CRB: When did you discover Leo Strauss?

HCM: I’m sure I heard of him from Harry Jaffa, but I didn’t pay enough attention, so Strauss wasn’t a big factor when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t really attend Harry’s classes in Columbus but he would take me around and talk to me about things, and he was very concerned with my physical fitness. He would take me swimming in the Ohio State pool, and got me interested in Woody Hayes and in Ohio State sports. My father disliked Hayes because my father had no appreciation for sports. I went to all the Ohio State games as a high school student, using tickets my father got as a faculty member but never used for himself.

I read Strauss’s Natural Right and History, which made a big impression on me when it came out in 1953, the year I graduated. I was looking for something about natural right but not natural law—not too strict, or lacking in regard for circumstances.

CRB: Natural Right and History also had a very interesting discussion of Burke, which must have appealed to you.

HCM: That’s right. And it certainly put paid to my enthusiasm for Max Weber.

CRB: Was there ever a moment of horror, or alarm, when your father realized that his son was becoming a Straussian?

HCM: Yes, but he got interested in Strauss. He was impressed by him and by the two articles [by Strauss] that my father published as the editor of the American Political Science Review [APSR]. I introduced Strauss and my father briefly at some point. He, and also my professors at Harvard, got interested in this strange new force. Friedrich, of course, knew all about Strauss, having gone to the same Gymnasium together in Germany.

CRB: You are an unusual Straussian who never formally studied with Strauss himself. When did you first meet him?

HCM: I think it was at one of the conferences organized by Robert Goldwin at the University of Chicago, probably around 1958 or maybe 1957, when I was still a graduate student. Goldwin organized these events, which would include people like Senator Charles Percy, and the proceedings of which would eventually be turned into books of scholarly essays. I have a collection of those volumes and contributed to many of them. And then, as I said, Strauss really gave me the idea for my Ph.D. dissertation. He did this in a conversation when he learned I was interested in studying parties, near the time when I first met him. To meet the people around him, like Joseph Cropsey, Allan Bloom, Marty Diamond, Herbert Storing, and of course Jaffa, was impressive and useful. They were a diverse lot, all of them inferior to Strauss but worthy of his attention in interesting ways. Strauss always treated me with a faux equality because I had not studied under him but had come up independently, from Harvard, despite the second- or third-class education I got there.

CRB: Some of Strauss’s students came to him with a strong religious background. You don’t seem—how shall I put this—to have been one of them.

HCM: That’s right. My parents were quite irreligious, in rebellion against their parents. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a missionary, a Congregationalist who was ministering to the Armenians during their massacre by the Turks. He did what he could to help them out. My mother was born in Armenia. My father’s father was a geologist with a Harvard Ph.D., who spent his life mapping and surveying parts of the West, especially Idaho, looking for minerals and mining possibilities. He and his wife were strong Presbyterians and also Republicans. I rather think my father mainly blamed religion for the existence of Republicans.

CRB: You’ve said somewhere that everything you know about religion you learned from atheists. Is that true?

HCM: It’s generally true. I don’t know whether to count Father [Ernest] Fortin [a Straussian who taught at Boston College] as an exception or not. I get people coming to me wanting to study medieval Arabic political philosophy, even though I know nothing about it, only because they know I knew about Strauss.

CRB: In the pages of the Claremont Review of Books, (“The Legacy of Leo Strauss After 50 Years,” Fall 2023) you’ve argued that although there are people called Straussians, there is no such thing as Straussism. Are you prepared to defend that distinction?

HCM: Yes, up to a point. Strauss himself said there is an odor of conservatism about his work. But there can easily be conservatives who are aggressively anti-Straussian. And there are conservative inclinations among Straussians, obviously, doubts about the entire project of 17th-century liberalism. What I’m mainly talking about are political judgments for today, concerning which there isn’t a Straussian party line. Trump has splintered everybody. I try to keep the attitude of a mother hen, keeping everyone close despite their disagreements. I’m against ruling people in or out of the Straussians based on their contemporary political judgments, or on the basis of what some people assert Strauss really thought about this or that issue. I think Strauss himself deliberately left his statements partial and even contradictory; and one has to distinguish, for instance, between his letters and his works. A lot of people just rely on the letters as if that’s the real guy. And besides, we’ve got enough enemies without fighting intramurally.

CRB: Trump seems to have splintered your own partisanship. You told The Harvard Crimson you wrote in Mike Pence for president in 2016, voted for Trump in 2020, but were so disgusted by the January 6 riot that you wrote Trump off then and there. How do you size up the political situation today, and for whom do you plan to vote, and why, in November 2024?

HCM: My experience with the Biden Administration has returned me to Trump, for whom it has been made quite clear there’s no alternative among Republicans as of now. I count myself a conservative Republican, which means a conservative who likes to win. I think especially of foreign policy, where the picture is cloudy for both parties. I am very strongly for aiding Israel and Ukraine, two allies of ours who actually want to fight for their own freedom and who have competent militaries of their own. The Biden team made very good initial responses to both, but since have shown plain signs of cooling, soon to become cold feet. Meanwhile Trump likes to keep his options ostensibly open and to make surly remarks about his, our allies. But keeping America great cannot mean gradual or any other kind of withdrawal from the world order we sustain. I believe Trump would see or feel that point and so give him the advantage there. Meanwhile, let the excellent Supreme Court gradually bring back the constitutional order that had been endangered by Democratic empathy experts.

CRB: Where do you think your own work, a long and multifaceted series of books and essays, fits into the Straussian universe? It seems to me you’ve been trying to explain something the other Straussians hadn’t quite tackled, how the institutions of modern government and its practices and mores, even, fit in with the ideas of political philosophers. You’ve tried to trace how political theory shaped or influenced modern political practice—from party government to representation to the media to executive power and the separation of powers. Is that how you see yourself?

HCM: To start with, I think it was part of Strauss’s generosity that he left certain topics, like all of America, and certain philosophers, like Montesquieu, to be studied by his students and by others. So many Straussians have written on Montesquieu because Strauss himself didn’t write a book about him. I worked on a subject, Machiavelli, that he had written on. And what a book that is! But I didn’t come to the same conclusion as Warren Winiarski did, who when he saw [Strauss’s] Thoughts on Machiavelli [1958], gave up his academic ambition and took up wine making [and later founded Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley]. Not that that wasn’t a wonderful thing, by the way! For the first time a world-class American wine. I was interested in Machiavelli because of modernity and because of parties, and I could see that what Strauss had left unsaid in Thoughts on Machiavelli concerned Machiavelli’s politics. That was my niche, or my wedge. Strauss had covered Machiavelli’s morality and religion but not his politics and the idea of indirect government, so that’s where I went.

CRB: What is this idea of “indirect government”? Could you describe it to our readers?

HCM: The difference between indirect government and the older idea and practice of direct government can be stated in the distinction between representation and rule. Rule is direct government: a society says what it is for, and those ruling principles are the principles of its rulers, who make no bones about teaching and indoctrinating citizens accordingly, even finding a religion that is suitable and supportive of what they say they want to do. So the claim to justice made by the rulers is frank and aboveboard. There is a multiplicity of those possible claims and of the regimes dedicated to them, and how to reconcile them and analyze them is what you see in Plato and Aristotle, especially in Aristotle.

CRB: And representation…?

HCM: Representation in the modern sense was invented in Hobbes’s Leviathan. In a representative democracy, the people don’t rule directly but elect “representatives” who represent the people, who are just another version or image of the people, who rule for the people and in their name. This means that the government is, to a considerable extent, hidden from the people. They accept it as their own; that’s where the indirectness comes in: the government doesn’t say what it wants, it says what you want, what its constituents want. So it can duck responsibility when something necessitous or disagreeable needs to be imposed, like military service or taxes. For instance, you’re driving and you get stopped by a policeman. And you protest, “Listen, I pay your salary. Why are you stopping me?” And he responds, “This is what you pay me for: to go after violators of the law.” So he is indirectly governing you by claiming that you are governing yourself. This starts with Machiavelli, who teaches that government is essentially not aboveboard and frank but essentially hidden and conspiratorial. The way to govern, therefore, is to keep it secret until it becomes necessary, or advantageous, to suddenly make it visible. You use this visibility to shock people, like cutting in two pieces Ramiro d’Orco, discussed in the seventh chapter of The Prince, which leaves the people astonished and stupefied. And that’s also what religion does, it hides its government of you by claiming to be the word of God. It knows God, and you don’t; so you take its word for it, that they are telling you what God wants.

CRB: In fact, don’t you argue that Machiavelli learned about the techniques of indirect government from the Catholic Church?

HCM: Yes, Machiavelli’s hidden or indirect government is a kind of appropriation of Christian religion: you confess your sins and then you accept your penance as due or voluntary, that is, not imposed on you, insofar as you’ve acknowledged already that you are a guilty sinner. So Machiavelli’s indirect government is both taken from Christianity and directed against it. Like David, who kills Goliath with a sling, and then David picks up Goliath’s sword and cuts his head off. David used Goliath’s own weapon against him. Machiavelli’s slogan “one’s own arms” means especially using one’s enemy’s weapons against him. This gets presented scientifically or conceptually by Hobbes in the notion of representative government. Which notion is in accord with Machiavelli’s statement, that harms you do to yourself hurt less than harms done to you by someone else, which sounds crazy but is true. Harms done to you by others add an intention to slight you, which causes them to hurt more and be resented more. These hidden things take advantage of our weaknesses and our sins and jealousies and concealed wishes, and use them against us, that is, in order to govern us. Thus reason or rational control, using these irrational means, leads eventually to liberalism, in the original, 17th century sense. That’s a big step—and yet here we are, still living with it many centuries later, and there is no real prospect of evading it because all the alternatives seem worse.

CRB: Didn’t Machiavelli also trace indirect government to Roman politics before Christ? To Rome’s discovery that the people didn’t necessarily want to rule in their own right and in their own name, so long as their property and freedom were protected? Is this a fact about human nature that Machiavelli claims the Romans discovered, or is it his value or evaluation of how he wished or wanted human nature to be?

HCM: It’s a fact of which he makes a value. It’s not as passive as it sounds, however, because he describes the popular “humor,” that is, the people’s typical attitude, as “they do not wish to be mastered.” There’s a thumos there: they would like to rule themselves. Everybody wants to be a master, but the weak recognize they can’t make it. It’s a little like Nietzsche’s “slave morality.” They imagine punishments and gods or a God in order to take their part, the people’s part, against the rich and the nobles, the grandi, the great. So in Machiavelli there isn’t any democracy in the way Aristotle described it. The people really are controlled by the government, indirectly; they don’t control the government themselves.

CRB: You have written more about Aristotle probably than about any other ancient writer. But you have often said that your interpretation of Aristotle owes a great deal to the work of your late wife, Delba Winthrop, who is well known as your co-translator and co-editor of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press. She died in 2006. In 2018 you ushered her doctoral dissertation on Aristotle into print, titled Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science, also from University of Chicago.

HCM: She never wanted to publish it; she kept pleading, “I need to know more Aristotle,” which is an infinite excuse. In a way, I didn’t appreciate it when she wrote it. Jeff Tulis of the University of Texas, Austin, encouraged me to have it published posthumously, and I’m grateful to him for that. She wrote it in a time of stress, when she was already an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. When I presented it to Chicago Press it sailed through, and it was published without a single word being changed, which is very unusual for any book, especially a dissertation. What she did is something no Straussian has done, to take a major portion of a major text and explain every line in it, and to make sense of it as a whole. The main point she pushed in Aristotle is the importance of assertion or assertiveness, a kind of extension of the power of thumos or spiritedness: maybe the intelligible whole that Aristotle discovered is too beautiful to be true, but we as human beings have a right to assert it. Delba pushed a little to promote the Idea of pushing. Every Straussian should read this extraordinary argument.

CRB: That recalls Strauss’s efforts, doesn’t it, to disentangle the ancients from certain theological or natural law interpretations that found man’s natural moral inclinations to be more reliably completed than is apparent from the human point of view?

HCM: Yes, that’s a good way to put it. But it isn’t merely the human point of view; there’s reason for it. We’re justified in making these assertions. This isn’t the Nietzschean assertion of the self. Philosophy from the beginning was hostile to mere assertiveness or willfulness—it asked, where’s the evidence?—but not completely hostile. It’s in the Politics that Aristotle makes his most comprehensive statement about the whole, implying the central role of political philosophy within philosophy. So as Delba showed, there was a certain amount of metaphysics in Book III of the Politics. Delba carried this interpretation much further and explained it more understandably than I ever did.

CRB: In many of your writings you’ve relied on The Federalist and Democracy in America as what you’ve called the two greatest books on America. You’ve written a lot, and very well, on Publius and Tocqueville. Given that these two great books don’t have quite the same view of America, what do you think, after a lifetime of study, is the relation between them?

HCM: To begin with, Tocqueville praises The Federalist in very high terms and uses it in his own analysis. They aren’t really comparable books. The Federalist was written to help get the Constitution ratified. Tocqueville wrote to discuss “democracy” in America. The Federalist doesn’t deal with the states and civil society directly, except to ward off the dangers of the Articles of Confederation. Religion, mores, education, women, the family, philosophical opinions—Tocqueville has a more comprehensive viewpoint.

CRB: Tocqueville also says more than once that democracy is inevitable, the so-called “inevitability thesis.” Publius never says that.

HCM: That’s true. Publius doesn’t predict as Tocqueville does. Publius is more optimistic that representative government can work, that an anti-majoritarian majority can be discovered and set in operation. For Tocqueville, the essential situation is that democracy is stronger than representation or representative government. So it’s a little bit back to Aristotle, that democracy is in charge and that everything in America is consequently democratic in a way that The Federalist didn’t really appreciate. In America, Tocqueville declares early in his book, the people are sovereign.

CRB: Yet Publius and Tocqueville each criticize democracy’s extremes or excesses, what Publius calls “majority faction” and Tocqueville “the omnipotence of the majority.”

HCM: They have a big difference over rights, though each considered rights the fundamental thing. Tocqueville is a little further from Locke, I would say, than is The Federalist. And of course in Democracy in America he never mentions the Declaration of Independence. Tocqueville says that rights are the political version of virtue, for one thing. He also traces rights to the Puritans, and to the Anglicans or Virginians’ aristocratic defense of English constitutionalism going back to the Magna Carta. All this stands in great contrast to Abraham Lincoln. Tocqueville didn’t know about Lincoln, of course, who managed to appeal to the Declaration in order to revive American democracy. Tocqueville has a very interesting and very incisive analysis of the slavery problem, albeit he didn’t see a way to get out of it, and he feared America would someday have a civil war between blacks and whites. Lincoln kept it from being between blacks and whites by keeping it a war in defense of the Union, and for the end of slavery, in all the ways that Harry had worked out, beautifully. Jaffa really gave us Lincoln as a great statesman. That’s what he did.

CRB: As a political physician, which prescription would you write for today’s America, The Federalist’s statesmanlike constitutionalism, or Tocqueville’s broader, more cultural conservatism, if you will? Do we need to choose between them, or are they complementary?

HCM: Well, the course of the civil rights movement and the consequences of it might suggest some of the dangers of raising rights as a political issue that could easily be appropriated and abused. That would point in the direction of Tocqueville, though of course Tocqueville is a champion of rights as well. Today, we have problems not only with blacks and whites taking proper advantage of all their opportunities in our society, but also with the Left, and progressivism, and the abuse of free speech and the denial of rights.

CRB: That brings us to Harvard. You’re a great and loyal son of Harvard, though a dissenting one. You’ve argued against grade inflation (hence your nickname, Harvey C-minus Mansfield), affirmative action, women’s studies, wokeism now. You’ve said truly of Harvard, “They let me speak but they never listened.” Maybe they will have to listen now. Harvard recently lost its affirmative action case before the Supreme Court; it lost its new president, Claudine Gay, to accusations of plagiarism and of being soft on anti-Semitism. The embarrassments accumulate.

HCM: Yes, they’re in a pickle. Everything they’ve wanted to do in the last decades under the name of diversity has come a cropper. Their poster lady for affirmative action has suffered a downfall. I almost feel sorry for her. In fact, I do feel sorry for her.

CRB: I wanted to ask about one aspect of that. Years before her downfall, when she was a graduate student at Harvard, the Government department voted her the Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science that year, in 1998. Were you involved in that vote?

HCM: Is that so? I didn’t know that. No, no, I wasn’t involved! Those dissertation prizes are chosen by a committee and are normally accepted as the committee’s decision and are hardly ever objected to. The department has to vote them, but they’re almost always voted without demurral. Sometimes they’re just announced.

CRB: It’s a logrolling operation, then? You vote for my honoree and I’ll vote for yours.

HCM: Yes. Actually, I got that prize myself [in 1961].

CRB: Well, there you go. Something you have in common with Claudine Gay. No wonder you feel sorry for her!

HCM: Incredible. How did you find this out?

CRB: I think it was in Harvard magazine, in a profile of her before her downfall.

HCM: My colleagues who supervised that dissertation must feel a bit ashamed, or at least uneasy.

CRB: There seems to be something rotten in the state of the Harvard Government department….

HCM: There does. That’s just what diversity means in practice. It’s not just a matter of toleration or affording an opportunity. It becomes a matter of overpraising and poor judgment, really.

CRB: So what happened to Harvard, to the school that used to boast, in its alma mater, of Harvard as a star “calm rising through change and through storm”? How can it get out of this pickle, as you call it?

HCM: Well, we’ll see whether calm rises. It won’t happen automatically.

CRB: Can Harvard’s problem be cured or alleviated by a change of personnel, by a new president?

HCM: Oh, sure. Especially after this episode. A better president already was Gay’s predecessor, Larry Bacow. I had a couple of interviews with him, and he complained that Harvard’s administrative principle of “each tub on its own bottom,” which refers not only to financing but also to governing its various parts, prevented him from doing very much. He couldn’t even change the administration of the College [the undergraduate portion of the University]. He kept Claudine Gay as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Rakesh Khurana as dean of Harvard College. They both were very woke, and in charge of many harmful enterprises. But somebody like Larry Summers could do a lot of good as president of Harvard.

CRB: But Summers was formerly Harvard’s president (2001-06) and suffered his own downfall.

HCM: That’s right. He had the students on his side but he got into trouble with the faculty. Still, I think a president could rather easily make happen the appointment of a number of conservatives to the administration and faculty. He could change the administration, which could make it clear to the departments that if they want appointments they will have to submit themselves to “viewpoint diversity,” as they say. Steven Pinker, the social psychologist who founded and inspired the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, has five principles that I think should guide the policies of a new Harvard president or of anyone who wants to reform our universities. The people on the Council are all liberals, so I try to keep silent most of the time; occasionally, I speak up. These principles are free speech; no coercion; viewpoint diversity; neutrality; and no DEI. Those five things would be a good program for reform almost anywhere.

CRB: Won’t viewpoint diversity be criticized as affirmative action for conservatives?

HCM: Sure, it will. But that argument can be answered. Without conservatives, they’ve created a bubble and produced college faculties that contain no conservatives but are divided into liberals and progressives, with the liberals following along meekly with the progressives. That has produced Claudine Gay and pro-Palestinian protestors. We need to shape up by giving ourselves a different understanding of the kind of professor who needs to be appointed.

CRB: Were you surprised by the public outbursts of anti-Semitism here and on other campuses across the country?

HCM: Very. I had no idea that this was so strong—that anybody at all respectable would defend baby decapitators, or the truly savage barbarity of the Hamas attack on Israel.

CRB: You came to Harvard when you were 17, and retired from Harvard last year when you were 91. With the exception of a few years teaching at U.C. Berkeley, you’ve spent your entire career here. You have never given up on her….

HCM: What gives me pause is the fact that Penny Pritzker of the Harvard Corporation is still in charge of the presidential search. Yet there have been two or three recent straws in the wind that are favorable. One was an article by Derek Bok [former Harvard president, 1971-91, and former dean of the law school, 1968-71] in Harvard magazine; he says at the end that Harvard needs more conservative professors. I really think that of the five things, that’s the main thing. If you can do that, the others will come along. There was an editorial in the Crimson saying that Harvard should be more neutral if we want our reputation back, if we don’t want to be treated so disrespectfully in the news and on Capitol Hill. Then there is the appointment of John Manning, who is dean of the law school and who is a conservative, as interim provost. I hope these are signs Harvard is capable still, as “Fair Harvard” says, of “calm rising through change and through storm.”