Over the past half century, which Mansfield has mostly spent within Harvard’s walls, the campus has morphed from a stodgy, conservative institution to a modern, liberalized college.

Mansfield too has changed—but almost in opposition to Harvard.

The softspoken liberal democrat who entered Harvard in 1949 has managed to become one of the most notorious, audaciously conservative professors on campus.

The C is for Change

Mansfield, whose father was a professor at Yale, was born in 1932 in New Haven, Conn., but grew up in Washington, D.C. He remembers feeling like he was at the center of the action during the war years in Washington, with parades in the streets and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 2004, in the Oval Office.

In 1947, the Mansfields moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Mansfield graduated from a public high school before coming to Harvard in 1949.

He reflects on his years as an undergraduate with self-effacing humor, remembering fondly a time when boys carried ties in their pockets, the football team was terrible and professors wore cufflinks to class.

Mansfield particuarly remembers taking a history of science class as a first-year with then-University President James B. Conant ’14.

“You didn’t have to get your hands dirty in the lab, but he would do experiments, I remember, in this great suit, with gold cufflinks on display,” Mansfield says. “He would make explosions and then hide behind a plastic sheet. That was kind of a thrill.”

Mansfield notes that Harvard was in a period of quiet transition when he arrived.

The College was slowly moving away from its prep-school conservatism to a more liberal atmosphere as a bigger wave of middle-class students moved onto campus. He remembers his class as being the first to have an equal number of students from public high schools and private schools.

But the remnants of the class structure were still clearly visible, Mansfield says, with the public school and prep school graduates still distinguishable by their wardrobes.

“When I came to Harvard, the school was in change,” Mansfield says. “There was a sort of division between high school and prep school graduates.”

The influx of more public school students onto campus began to influence the political leaning of the student body.

As the national concern about communism grew and the Cold War began, Mansfield remembers an opposition to McCarthy that transcended bipartisan divisions.