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What Mansfield Meant

To the editors:

It seems that the comments Mansfield makes are simply not understood by those who attack him. He is quoted as saying, "White professors were unwilling to give black students C's to avoid giving them a rough welcome [in the early 1970s]. At the same time they didn't give C's to white students to be fair."

That hardly implies anything about all black students. It seems the only way to make sense of that comment is as something along the lines of "white professors were unwilling to give C's to those black students who deserved C's. To be fair, they couldn't continue to give C's to white students with the same performance." It is completely unclear how this, as one student in the article claims, "discredit[s] the efforts of African-Americans who came [to Harvard] and worked so hard."

Rather, Mansfield's comment says that the grades that some of the black students received were inflated, as were the grades of many white students, since grades were inflated generally. The source of this problem is conceived of as white professors' unwillingness to give some students the grades that they deserved. It seems clear that Mansfield's statement, then, is a censure of white professors in the 1970s, as he claims it is.

What bothers and confuses me is that this statement is being met with such a negative reaction. If what Mansfield had actually intended is offensive, then it would make sense to be upset about that.

However, it seems that the negative student reaction is aimed at something that is not quite what Mansfield said--some sort of mental construction that contorts Mansfield's words and attributes to him a position that he does not and did not take.