Harvey C. Mansfield `53

Harvey “C-minus” Mansfield, long known for his rigorous grading, shocked the campus with a new grading trick this year. Voicing adamant aversion to grade inflation, a “glaring flaw in American education,” Mansfield announced at the beginning of the spring semester that he would assign two sets of grades to the students in Government 1061: “Modern Political Philosophy”--initial grades, centered around a C, would accurately reflect the quality of students’ work and compare them to their peers. The second set of grades, the ones submitted to the registrar, would reconfigure the marks according to Harvard’s inflated system, centering around a B+.

Mansfield says he didn’t like the pressure to raise grades because students were receiving better marks in all their other classes.

“I don’t want to continue punishing students for a situation that is not their fault,” Mansfield says. “I’ve had to adjust my grades upward over the years, and the strain on my conscience has become too great.”

To prove his point, Mansfield asked the FAS registrar to compile the grades given out to Harvard students last year. To the surprise of all, the registrar’s records say that 51% of all grades given to Harvard undergraduates were some form of A: 25% were ‘A’s and 25%were ‘A-‘s.

Mansfield, and many of the television and radio show hosts who interviewed the notorious professor, were appalled by this statistic.

“In no other walk of life would you say that one quarter of the practitioners are worthy of As,” Mansfield says. “Nobody who knows anything about grades would give anything as generous as that which the Harvard Faculty gives.”

As the semester ends, Mansfield says that he likes the way his grading experiment worked out, and he might do it again next year.

“It's a temporary measure, until the faculty decides to do something about grade inflation” he says. “It certainly got a lot of attention, and none of it very favorable to Harvard.”

But the Gentleman’s C is not that bad, Mansfield reminds.

“Of course this is a Harvard C, so it's still good,” he says. “It doesn't mean you're dumb.”

Nick Brown

Second-year law school student Nick Brown may not have won the million dollars, but he has certainly been a recognized survivor this year.

As one of the contestants on CBS’s hit show “Survivor II,” Brown has walked away with a little more fame that he bargained for.