Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation and a longtime Harvard administrator, said the rise in grades can largely be attributed to academically stronger student bodies and faculty legislation that liberalized pass/fail policies.

"I think that Harvey is not right," said Whitla. "The real important thing to show is some evidence. This idea [of Mansfield's] has been around for a long time."

Professors, students and administrators present during the '60s and '70s generally agree there was a change in attitude toward grades during the period. Many attributed that shift to the turbulent times and the general questioning of authority prevalent then.

"I certainly don't think it has anything to do with race at all," said Adams House Master and Loker Professor of English Robert J. Kiely, who was a professor at the time. He attributes rising grades to "a sort of questioning of the whole grading system in general" by professors, undergraduates and graduate students during the period.

Donald L. Fanger, Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, links rising grades to the "egalitarian" attitudes of the time.

John T. Dunlop, who was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973, said he could not recall any discussion of race as a factor in inflation. He said, instead, that rebellious teaching fellows and younger professors may have been responsible.

"There was this tendency among teaching fellows and younger faculty to give high grades as a form of protest," Dunlop said.

Fanger said he recalls speaking to a colleague in the early '70s who "thought a teaching fellow in his class had automatically given everybody an A."

"I think that might be a sign of those times," he said.

However, some students disagreed with the notion that professors of the time were on the cusp of social change.

"The core of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were not 24-year-old TFs but professors in their 50s or 60s, and their ideas were not that radical," said Robinson, the New York banker. "They were a lot more like Nathan Pusey than they would like to believe."

Thomas S. Williamson Jr. '68, who said he will soon be nominated to a position in the Department of Labor, said he believed the unusual upward trend would have to have been caused by bigger factors than race.

"There was more a philosophy than anything that had to do with race," Williamson said. "My sense was that grade inflation had gotten well on its way before there was an expansion of minority student admissions."

But one former professor and graduate student suggested that the anti-establishment attitude was nothing more than a facade.

"On one hand, you had a counterculture where people pertended not to be interested in grades," said William Schneider, a pollster for CNN and a former graduate student and assistant professor during the '60s and '70s. "At the same time...it's also the rise of the meritocracy. We had the beginnings of a far more rigorous sorting out, weeding process."