But while the political climate at Harvard remained tranquil despite the outbreak of the Korean War, with little activism on campus, Mansfield says a clear shift in the political beliefs of undergraduates was beginning.

“The political complexion changed due to this influx of high school students,” Mansfield says. “I remember in 1952, of course we couldn’t vote then, but there was a straw poll in which Eisenhower won over Stevenson. Then, in 1956, Stevenson won, and ever since then students have been liberal.”

In the straw poll, Mansfield had voted for the democratic Stevenson.

During this time, Mansfield was a serious student who had few friends and preferred to remain outside the fray of political debate.

A self-described “grind” as an undergraduate, Mansfield eschewed extracurricular activities in favor of studying on his own.

In the early years of the General Education curriculum, Mansfield says before grade inflation existed—Mansfield notes that C’s were the average grade then—many students found the adjustment to Harvard difficult. Mansfield himself says that as a first-year he “had his moments of doubt and challenge” with his academics.

He planned to pursue a career as a Soviet expert, but struggled with Russian and soon realized that he did not want to spend his career reading communist manuscripts.

He was enchanted by political theory and decided to pursue this passion, which would define the next 50 years of his life.

Upon graduating from Harvard, Mansfield spent one year on a Fulbright Scholarship before being drafted into the army in 1954, where he remained for two years, although he never served.

In 1956, Mansfield returned to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., which he finished in 1960. After a two-year stint as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Mansfield returned to Harvard for good and received tenure in 1965.

The C is for Conservative

While Harvard had slowly been moving to the left when Mansfield departed for Berkeley, the young liberal democrat returned to his alma mater a newly-born conservative.

Frustrated by the complacency with which liberals treated the Soviet and communist threat and disenchanted with the values of the Democratic Party, Mansfield turned slowly to the right.

“Politically it was communism that made me conservative,” he says. “Liberals were not sufficiently anti-communist—they were soft on communism. They had a spot in their hearts for anything on the left.”

Pforzheimer Professor of Government Sidney Verba ’53, who knew Mansfield as an undergraduate—they lived in Leverett House together but lost touch after graduation—and later replaced Mansfield as the chair of Harvard’s government department, says that Mansfield’s experience at radically liberal Berkeley might have actually pushed him further to the right.