“I would certainly imagine, having been in California teaching in the 1960s, a time when everybody was becoming more politically involved, that the strong left position at Berkeley might have pushed some people, like [Mansfield], in the direction of more conservative politics,” Verba says. “It would have made him more politically engaged.”

On returning to Harvard in 1963, Mansfield says he soon found that his politics set him apart from other professors on a liberal campus that was soon entrenched in the tumult of Vietnam War politics.

Mansfield recalls the Vietnam War as being “pretty terrible,” saying that the politically-motivated divisions on campus were difficult to bear.

“I was angry every day I came home,” he says. “The place was divided into two parties—everybody knew what side everybody else was on.”

Mansfield recalls Faculty meetings that turned into ideological debates, numerous confrontations with students and the brutal suppression of the 1969 University Hall takeover.

As democrats became more politically activist, Mansfield was increasingly repulsed by the constant liberal agitation that spilled over into University politics.

While Mansfield says then-University President Derek C. Bok and then-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Henry A. Rosovsky sympathized with the liberal protesters, he began to carve out his place as the definitive conservative voice on campus.

“He is a person who has a deep commitment to what he thinks is a traditional set of values that he feels is being neglected by political inclinations,” Verba says.

The C is for Controversy

Over the past 30 years, Mansfield has stubbornly defended these traditional values against the majority of faculty members and students.

One of Mansfield’s main—and most unpopular—battles has been against the study of women as a separate academic field. He first voiced his opposition to this idea in a memorable Faculty meeting debate in the late 1970s.

At the meeting, he vehemently denounced the idea of a women’s studies committee, on the grounds that it was “really feminist studies, and you can’t study women without studying men as well.”

Instead of convincing his colleagues not to pursue the new academic committee, his arguments served to unite the Faculty against him and virtually assure the creation of the women’s studies committee.

While Mansfield lost the fight in that Faculty meeting, he’s continued his argument by researching social and biological constructs of gender and writing a book on manliness. He even taught a seminar on it this past spring.

Mansfield argues that the two genders have distinct roles in society.