Harvey Mansfield is a retired professor of government at Harvard University and the author of “Where Harvard Went Wrong,” from which this op-ed, published originally in the Harvard Crimson, is adapted.
Lack of viewpoint diversity is the main field of the battle still raging between Harvard and the Trump administration, which in March sued the university for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination and sought to halt its federal grant payments. Until recently, “diversity” referred to race and sex, but opponents of this sort of diversity argued that the term should include opinion as well. “Viewpoint diversity” is their term. Clearly diversity is the darling of the left, and viewpoint diversity the counter from the right.
Harvard’s one-sided fondness for the left, comprehensive and prolonged, provoked its clash with the Trump administration. It also revealed a deeper division between science and the humanities — quiet now, but with a Harvard history.
Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives, not a further sprinkling of garish extremes. To lack a proper mix of left and right is not legally a crime — a reasonable point for Harvard — but it is a massive error, one that has forced Harvard into the courts. To depend on the courts to defend the university’s independence from federal oversight is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege. One can see the risk in depending on courts within the very policy of diversity, when that word was suggested to universities in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court’s 1978 case on affirmative action in student admissions. Yet in 2023, the court reversed itself, stymieing the universities by declaring race-based affirmative action in admissions illegal and unconstitutional. At this point, “viewpoint diversity” redeems diversity only by calling for the inclusion of diversity’s opponents.
If Harvard wants to prevent further trouble with Republicans, it needs to change its attitude. As the Harvard administration has begun to see, it needs to drop its gratuitous partisan posture. There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to the university.
Who risks the most in Harvard’s battle? The scientists, who need the government’s money to carry on their work of usually expensive experimentation in laboratories. This opens up a second problem of viewpoint diversity within universities that is not so easy to fix: the divide between the scientists and the humanists.
When I arrived as a freshman at Harvard, I took a course, Natural Sciences 4, taught by the university’s then-president James B. Conant. He was a scientist who took a leading part in the direction of the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb. Absorbed in the question of whether this was a good thing for humanity, he inspired a new program at Harvard called “General Education,” to which this course belonged. To make education “general,” including both science and humanities, seemed to be the goal.
After this course, the differences between these fields became clearer to me. Science deals with numbers, the humanities with persons — the particular human beings from which science abstracts. If a course takes up proper nouns like Shakespeare and Goethe, it belongs to the humanities; if it concerns impersonal objects as common nouns, it is science.
Our names are essential to us. Every human being has a proper name, each different, to respect the human desire for self-importance. Yet a doctor using medical science does not need to know your name to treat your human body. Science is a nameless, collective enterprise of what “we know.” Humanities professors write their own books and make “contributions” to Shakespearean literature.
Science progresses by discarding old hypotheses and finding new ones. The humanities do not progress — who now equals Homer and Shakespeare? — but offer insights into permanent human truths of honor and beauty that the scientific method cannot discern or recognize.
Humanities pore over dusty books and archives. Science, with its “pioneering research,” can, by contrast, deliver manifest benefits, above all in modern medicine. But science or its technology also delivers risks to humanity from possible atomic warfare and climate change. Perhaps science has remedies for the dangers it brings, but perhaps not.
Moreover, science needs to address and convince the nonscientific public that its research is worth funding. This is difficult, because the exactness of modern science arises from its use of mathematics, which keeps it remote from the great majority of human beings who are not adept with numbers. The public has to be addressed with rhetoric — which is inexact and often promises too much. Experience shows that science itself is both hypothetical and open-minded, while the task of conveying science is often partisan and closed-minded.
Science dominates the university, but it cannot defend or explain itself without departing from scientific rigor. There is no scientific proof that science is good.
Yet turning from science to the humanities for assistance, one encounters postmodern arguments that flounder in helpless relativism. Far from giving reasons science might be good, the humanities fail to justify even themselves.
Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society, the university’s advocates say; it’s worth the money! But doesn’t the university need some standard from outside society to justify itself as independent? Something like Veritas (Harvard’s motto) that combines science and the humanities — a Harvard that looks for the wisdom that makes science valuable to human beings.
A political scientist myself, I like to think that this wisdom centers on politics. A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have protected the scientists and corrected the humanists.
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