Shots In The Dark: Harvey Mansfield Hits the Times

Monday, March 13, 2006

Harvey Mansfield Hits the Times

Yesterday's NYT Mag featured this Deborah Solomon interview with Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield, famous (well, relatively famous) for being one of the few conservatives at Harvard. (At least among the professoriat.)

Solomon spoke with Mansfield about his new book, Manliness, which tries to define the quality of manliness and argue that it is a very good thing. Mansfield's quick definition: Manliness is "confidence in a situation of risk."

I'm not sure of the value of defining confidence as a gender-specific term, because it clearly isn't gender-specific. (Although Mansfield might disagree.) But Mansfield is so coy, it's hard to know when to take him seriously and when he's just trying to bait you.

Consider this exchange:

Were you sorry to see Harvard's outgoing president, Lawrence Summers, attacked for saying that men and women may have different mental capacities?

He was taking seriously the notion that women, innately, have less capacity than men at the highest level of science. I think it's probably true. It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.

But couldn't that simply reflect the institutional bias against women over the centuries?

It could, but I don't think it does. We have been going a couple of generations now. There are certain things that haven't changed. For example, in New York City, the doormen are still 98 percent men.>>

"It's common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are"? Surely Mansfield can not think that this is a credible foundation for a serious argument. Perhaps he is merely trying to stir the pot, get himself on Fox News, and sell a few copies of his book.

I admire Mansfield's willingness to speak his mind—he spoke to me on the record for Harvard Rules, something many other profs were unwilling to do—but the book sounds unconvincing. I wonder if it is not a coincidence that "manliness" and "Mansfield" sound alike....

¶ 8:39 AM

Comments:

"Perhaps he is merely trying to stir the pot, get himself on Fox News, and sell a few copies of his book."

Indeed. Mansfield--who is so fastidious about his look that I consider him the biggest dandy on the Harvard faculty--is nothing if not opportunistic. This is why I wish the media wouldn't pay him quite so much attention. That said, there was a cute piece in the Boston Globe on the 12th containing the following gem from Anne Norton, a political scientist at University of Pennsylvania:

"It would make his story a lot more interesting, she says, if he acknowledged that Achilles, in Mansfield's words ''the manly hero par excellence without whom a book on manliness can hardly be composed," probably slept with other men-and is described as being as pretty as a girl."

# posted by Anonymous : 10:31 AM

Poor Harvey: he is pathetic and increasingly senile. He is the only person at Harvard who takes Harvey Mansfield seriously anymore. People need to know when to stop talking, and he doesn't.

# posted by Anonymous : 7:03 AM

Doesn't his point about NYC doormen call into question his point about top scientists?

He certainly has not cited any evidence to prove his theory that a very few men are innately more gifted mathematically than the most gifted women, or at least not any that meets the laugh test or would earn a social scientist tenure at, say, Harvard.

# posted by cyber joe : 11:42 AM

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