Conservative Faculty Need Affirmative Action

I hear the outrage: What! These conservatives spend years in combat against affirmative action, accusing it of ills both moral and material. Then, less than two years after they win their point at the Supreme Court, they put hat in hand and beg for the very advantage they claimed to despise?

Decriers will say conservatives would condemn themselves of hypocrisy. They would exaggerate the importance of politics at a university. And they would confuse the value of conservatism with the fact of progress in science. My opponents would then conclude that there is indeed a lack of conservatives at Harvard, but it doesn’t matter.

Having more conservatives would not improve Harvard. Right?

Wrong. Let a conservative like myself make the case that more conservative faculty at Harvard will make it better and help it defend itself.

Harvard needs conservative faculty to improve the quality of what is commonly heard and thought, to expand the range of its moral and political opinion, and to help restore demanding academic standards of grading. All in all, to achieve nonpartisanship, Harvard first must achieve bipartisanship.

Consider the present situation of Harvard to see the relevance of conservative thinking. What we have is a minority of pro-Palestinian sentiment that is a danger to our good humor and a disgrace to our good name. The reaction of many liberals is sympathy for a minority protesting injustice, even if some of the minority support Hamas, a band of rapists and murderers. How should Harvard deal with them? Liberals would look for a definition of free speech that includes the right to protest but sets limits on it. “No bullying,” for example. This would be a neutral, impartial definition that applies equally to speech you like and speech you don’t like.

Conservatives might say (for they differ among themselves) that a neutral definition disregards an essential distinction. Speech you don’t like may come from an opponent or from an enemy. An opponent favors free speech and stays within the regime of free speech, an enemy does not.

Both have the right to free speech but not in equal measure — how the right is exercised matters. Is it racist? Directed against Black people or Jews? Neutrality to defend free speech leads to indifference as to the value of what is said. Any speech, no matter how damaging or delusional, is held to have value if it is permitted. Neutrality is a low standard that tends to replace a higher standard.

Liberals need conservatives to remind them of the difference between opponents and enemies. In an earlier piece, I spoke of the difference between liberals, who look down in empathy, and conservatives, who look up in admiration. Liberals tend to dislike distinctions that cause inequalities, in this case friends and enemies. Some of them may think that the only enemies to liberalism are the ones, namely conservatives, who believe in the existence of enemies. Conservative faculty tend to correct this mistake, and that is one reason why Harvard needs them.

Why was affirmative action said to be a good thing? Because it would bring diversity to Harvard. But diversity in what? Not in skin color or body type, but in the point of view that Black people and women would bring their lived experience to the community. The advantage would be in what they would say, not how they look. But what they said added to the number of the left.

Somehow, affirmative action did not at all increase the proportion of conservatives on campus, even though some Black and many female conservatives exist. I believe that in practice, affirmative action only allowed for the admission of its supporters. The intended diversity of speech produced a single form of speech and behavior. Strangely, proponents have called it diversity.

Conservatives, with their appreciation for inequalities, know that there will always be liberals who love equality, while liberals see no reason why conservatives should exist. To them, the latter are just backward souls who selfishly resist progress. Liberals believe that morality means feeling sorry for those who are vulnerable and unfortunate, and they see no reason to feel sorry for conservatives. When it comes time for faculty appointments, liberals have exhausted their generosity with those qualified as “diverse,” and they have no remnant left over to waste on conservatives.

Some liberal faculty also believe that their profession is about facts and their liberal values are personal and subjective. To be professional is therefore to ignore whether anyone is liberal or conservative. It is wrong to consider, wrong even to count, the conservatives who are not being appointed. In the last election the District of Columbia voted 92 percent for Kamala Harris.

This is perfectly acceptable because everyone knows that the District works for the common good of the whole country, such logic goes. Will Harvard get away with that sort of excuse for its composition and behavior? As for the fact/value dichotomy, the late Harvard philosophy professor Hilary W. Putnam wrote a book in 2004 on its collapse. He supported liberal causes, and he was right.

Conservatives in their admiring aspect uphold academic standards and liberals, with their empathy, do not. Grade inflation has reached a point where most everyone sees it is mistaken, but it was liberals who presided over its rise at Harvard in the last half-century. In my experience, not one of them was willing to join conservative objectors to it, because any point made by a conservative is bound to be wrong.

For students, “the hardest part about Harvard is getting in,” as the saying goes, as grade inflation makes the school easy once you’re there. However, easy is also anxious. The ridiculous grading system forces everyone to seek a perfect record of A’s that has little or no meaning. Conservative faculty have the right principle to address the sorry mess of Harvard’s grading.

I conclude that diverse political opinion in a university matters and that Harvard has suffered for lacking it. By “diverse,” I mean conservative vs. liberal. It is a scandal that there are more pro-Palestinians at Harvard than conservatives. To correct our opinion imbalance, I propose a general formula.

Do not try to make Harvard nonpartisan by aiming at nonpartisanship. Liberals all by themselves will not become more nonpartisan, for they believe they are nonpartisan already. You will get a nonpartisan result only if you try much harder to be bipartisan.

Affirmative action for conservatives would achieve what affirmative action was originally meant to do, which was to make Harvard more truly diverse.

How about a reluctant, somewhat forced cheer for the very much underrepresented majority in America? Harvard can do better, and it must. To achieve nonpartisanship, it must first become bipartisan.

Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard.