Harvey "C-plus" Mansfield?

Students: If you were scared away from Government 1061: "The History of Modern Political Philosophy" by the despotic grading of Kenan Professor of Government Harvey "C-minus" Mansfield, you may want to reconsider. This semester Mansfield just may give you a C-plus.

In a move of backhanded benevolence, Mansfield has decided to give students two grades: one low enough to confirm Mansfield's belief that no undergraduate possesses the infinite wisdom necessary to master the great works presented in his class, and one high enough to soothe Mansfield's fear that he is single handedly keeping hundreds of students out of graduate school and coveted I-banking jobs by lowering their GPAs. The latter grade will be burned onto students' transcripts; the former onto their egos.

Mansfield seems to have adopted this system under the misguided notion that a two-tiered system will put him in line with the times. Arrogance and a deprecating demeanor may have been requirements of teaching positions in Machiavelli's Europe, but sometime in the last several centuries pedagogy accepted the principle that it isn't the job of a professor merely to point out how little a student knows. Indeed, if Mansfield weren't so preoccupied with standing up against the liberal gods of grade inflation--who have so erroneously fooled the world into thinking that ignorant Harvard students are capable of earning high marks--he might discover that some students in his class actually deserve a B-plus, or maybe even an A.

That said, we are glad that Mansfield has finally chosen to separate explicitly his private feelings about grade inflation from his public assessments of students, and we encourage professors who agree with him on grade inflation to adopt a similar approach. Grades are used as a measure not only in individual courses, but also across courses and academic careers. A future graduate school or employer finding a Mansfield-inflicted C-minus on an applicant's transcript will assume that the students' work in the course was uniquely deficient, not that the professor was uniquely honest. A lonely giver of C's, like a voice crying in the wilderness, will hardly end the problem (if there is one) of inflated grades. As a result, professors like Mansfield who wish to make a political point about grade inflation should issue separate grades, complaining on their personal soapbox instead of their students' transcripts.