From the Editors: In this essay, Dr. Franck explains the mechanics behind the breakdown of studies programs at universities and colleges - or perhaps, mainly, the introduction of questionable studies programs to begin with. Programs such as Women's studies or Middle Eastern studies suffer from lack of perspective, and breed factions that cleanse out dissent. We think that if this breakdown were played on violins, it would sound like the notes from a beautiful symphony being removed one by one until all violins played only a single, stale note. No one likes this; the best way to appreciate a note or a violin is to hear its part within the whole.
In his recent book Where Harvard Went Wrong, Harvey Mansfield collects some sixteen essays and addresses he has produced on higher education in general and Harvard in particular over the last quarter century. The seventeenth item in the book—literally its center, the ninth item in the table of contents—is titled “Harvard Faculty Speeches,” comprising twenty-three more or less extemporaneous statements Mansfield made in university faculty meetings during an earlier period, 1975 to 2006. Ranging from half a page to some four pages in length, these remarks, preserved in meeting minutes and in Mansfield’s own contemporaneous notes, address continually vexing questions in the academy: grade inflation, affirmative action, student life and conduct, dubious curricular proposals, and the university’s relation to the wider world. As the book’s subtitle indicates—Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears—Professor Mansfield broke his lance on a great many windmills in his six decades in Harvard’s government department.
