The Mansfield Affair

In January, The Crimson wrote two articles about grade inflation. In the second article, near the bottom of the story, the newspaper quoted Thomson Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield, who said grade inflation arose in the 1970s because "professors were unwilling to give a C to a Black."

More than a month later, Zaheer R. Ali '94, president of the Black Students Association, wrote a letter to The Crimson, calling our failure to adequately challenge Mansfield's views a "gross oversight." The letter, which was also sent to Harvard administrators, also faulted faculty and administrators for not responding to Mansfield.

The Crimson's reporting on grade inflation, taken as a whole, was reasonably comprehensive. We explored the differences between grading in the sciences and the humanities. We quoted various teachers attributing grade inflation to "relativism," professorial laziness and increased competition for jobs and graduate school. Others said students get the grades they deserve.

But we failed in our coverage of Mansfield's allegation about the connection between race and grades. We didn't realize how seriously his comments would affect and offend Black students. As a result, we didn't do follow-up stories in which his theory was challenged.

Why didn't we better judge the news value of Mansfield's comments? Why weren't those follow-up stories assigned? And why weren't President Neil Rudenstine's comments made in January, which strongly disputed Mansfield's ideas, reported until this week?

To begin with, the biases here may well have been political as much as racial. Mansfield is commonly dismissed as a conservative crackpot who says provocative things just to be controversial. We probably hoped that our failure to devote much attention to Mansfield's charges showed that we didn't believe them. Academic biases may also have played a role--during exam period, students don't like writing stories about grade inflation.

We thought we were discrediting Mansfield's remarks by not paying them much attention. Putting his comments low down in the story, off the front page, was a way of showing that we didn't think they held much water.

Ali interpreted our coverage in the opposite way. He thought our lack of coverage indicated a "dangerous acceptance of [Mansfield's] views as being truthful."

This interpretation is understandable. Ali points out that The Crimson has a history with Black students at Harvard such that a single innocent mistake can be interpreted as yet another action in the pattern of a hostile institution.

One of the major goals at The Crimson in recent years has been to change that history, that mistrust, that pattern of perceived hostility. But changing that pattern requires more than good intentions. I'm well intentioned. I did ask Rudenstine his opinion of Mansfield's comments.

But in the article following that interview focused on Rudenstine's comments on gays in the military. The (white) editors that made the decision regarding the article agreed with me that Rudenstine's comments about gays were more timely, and thus more newsworthy, than his debunking of Mansfield.

Change in the composition of The Crimson's staff would go a long way toward alleviating some of these problems. With more African American students as editors and reporters, The Crimson would less likely to be seen as a hostile force. We might also be more sensitive the concerns of Black students.

All this is not an excuse. White or Asian reporters and editors (like me) should have covered the Mansfield affair better, and could have. Better communication and reporting would have informed us how Black students felt at the time.

Our coverage of the Mansfield affair, and the subsequent reaction, has only strengthed our already existing resolve to diversify what Ali calls in his letter "the yet-to-be-diversified Crimson group."

To that end, The Crimson has established an internal committee on minority recruitment and staff diversity. The committee, composed of students of all backgrounds, will assess the Crimson's current staff diversity, analyze the problems that exist, seek expert advice on how to do better and set concrete, measurable goals for diversifying the staff.

This fall, The Crimson held a conference (co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation and the Afro-American Studies Department) aimed at recruiting minorities and at educating the community about diversity in the news and in the newsroom. Editors also attended meetings of many minority groups in an effort to recruit compers. By adding a structure within The Crimson expressly for the purpose of diversifying the staff, we hope to build on these efforts and insure a sustained effort.

Over the coming weeks, the members of committee will interview minority students on and off The Crimson to find out why they comped and why they decided not to. We'll search the country for the college newspapers that are most successful in attracting minority staff members, and we'll try to copy what they do right. In addition, we'll compile statistics on the make-up of the current staff and we'll set goals for improvements.

And, through this space, we'll let the community know periodically about the results.