The Salient: In your new book Manliness, you say that some men have manly assertion that can both be a virtue and a curse. In your opinion, did Larry Summers have too much or too little?

Harvey Mansfield: He's a manly fellow, but he made his administration too much of a one-man show. He should have gathered a party of a defenders and supporters in the administration itself and in the Faculty. But instead, he went on his own, and by his many apologies, left his defenders discouraged and dismayed. But he had a manly project, to renew Harvard, to make it great. Right now, Harvard is wealthy, famous, and prestigious. But it isn't great. It isn't running on all its cylinders. It doesn't get all that it needs out of the Faculty nor out of its students.

Salient: If a lack of assertion was one of Summers' main faults, can his supporters also share a blame for not defending him? None did so at the February 7 meeting, for example.

HM: Summers was lacking in organized, well-managed assertiveness. He had plenty of what you might call professorial assertiveness: challenging your reasons for believing as you do, and behaving as you do. This is what I mean by lack of management: there was no indication to any of his supporters that they should be there to defend him. So I, for example, wasn't there.

Salient: Was there some mismanagement as to when the meeting was going to be, or what?

HM: There are regular meetings and plenty of notice about the meetings. But that he would need his defenders to be there and to speak up against his critics was never conveyed: that's what I mean by organizing his defense, or lack of it. Another thing he failed to do, which Dean Kirby also failed to do, was to see to it that the Faculty Council was not composed of the president's enemies. But last year, they both allowed an election to go forth which only had his enemies on the ballot.

Salient: What does the Faculty Council do?

HM: It meddle. It's a committee that represents the Faculty and takes up a number of issues that administrators or deans want to put before it. And so, it discusses things from the faculty's point of view.

Salient: I am going to ask two questions and you can choose whichever suits your mood on this one. What role should the faculty play in today's academy? Or, what would Machiavelli make of a no-confidence vote of the faculty?

HM: The no-confidence vote happened because the ballot was secret. If the Faculty had had to raise their hands in public, they would not have done what they did. But this was an opportunity for them to kick President Summers without taking responsibility.

Harvard's Faculty has much more say in the government of the university than faculties at most other universities. When the Faculty is responsible, that's good; when it isn't, that's bad. But in general, it's very hard for the Faculty to govern. Its senior members are tenured, and thus they're not by nature team players whose livelihood and success depends on the success of the team. A professor chooses his own subject to work in and is judged by his peers, but what he does and how he spends his day is pretty much up to him. That's a picture of self-governance for each individual, but not for a group. It's much easier for a professor to want to veto something than to desire that it go forward, and we see this very clearly in the Curriculum Review.

In the present day, this individuality or individualism of professors is exaggerated by the general belief in relativism, which says that no one subject is more important than any other. And this encourages a professor to teach his own subject and to protect it, instead of looking for subjects that every student should be asked to study. Relativism promotes an attitude opposed to requirements, or indeed a coherence of any kind.

Salient: A colleague of yours, Anthropology Professor J. Lorand Matory, once said that President Summers should be dismissed because of his "apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." Can you comment on this?

HM: This suggests how true it is that Summers was ousted for his opinions and not his brusqueness. It was a question of substance, not style. Professor Matory is a very manly professor, however. He got up in the Faculty and spoke his piece with verve and dignity. Afterwards, we had a beer together.

Salient: To what extent is Summers a victim of what you call the "gender-neutral society"?

HM: A very considerable extent. Summers showed that he was not in favour of the diversity agenda, that he would hire and promote professors on the basis of excellence, rather than seeking to fulfil a quota of sex or race.

Salient: In Manliness, you say that manliness implies assertion of one's worth, defence of one's own, and a willingness to risk everything for it. This view of man standing resolutely fighting against the world, doesn't it lead to a kind of martyr complex mentality?

HM: Yes.

Salient: That minority groups on campus often use…

HM: Yes, minority and majority groups, all kinds of manly men, suffer in general from a martyrdom complex. That's why the favorite philosophy of manly man is stoicism. It's me against the world. If I don't speak up, no one will. Everything depends on me; that's why I deserve to be important.

Salient: It leads to a kind of paradox, because at Harvard at least, the most assertive groups tend to be those like the BGLTSA.

HM: Yes, the manliest group is the least in favour of manliness?

Salient: That's the paradox.

HM: The women's movement is a good example of manliness, because they picked up an issue that had been lying, unnoticed, latent—the equality of women—and made it public, and active. There's an example of manly assertiveness. Now the way they did it was more in accordance with traditional femininity than perhaps they recognized. Their method was what they called "to raise consciousness," which is to embarrass men, and bluff them out of making claims of superiority. This was very successful. But though they were revolutionaries, not one of them ever spent fifteen minutes in jail, unlike the civil rights movement and also unlike the suffragettes of the nineteenth century.

Salient: Because they took care not to break the law?

HM: Yes. They're the first revolutionaries whose solution for inequality is to call the police; that's sexual harassment law.

Salient: In the first chapter of your new book, you try to establish the persistence of manliness in the gender-neutral society. Yet, to show that manliness is a virtue, why do you need to show that manliness is natural? Can't it be a virtue independent of its origins?

HM: I was as much concerned to show that it was natural as that it was a virtue. This is not a book that is meant to be in praise of manliness. If I were writing such a book, it would more about gentlemanliness than about manliness, and gentlemanliness is refined manliness. And I didn't want to write a book that laments the loss of the gentleman, but to begin from a lower standpoint, which is whether there is such a quality that pertains to men rather than women, on the whole, with exceptions.

The relation between nature and virtue comes when you ask whether it makes sense to praise a virtue that, due to our nature, is impossible. If you wanted to fashion a virtue, people would be able to adopt it or learn it as an advantage. But I begin from the fact that men do seem to have a quality of manliness about them that you don't find in women, or not to the same degree, or in the same way. That quality is to be willing, even eager, to risk yourself in defending yourself. When you feel some slight, you react; and when you react, you make an assertion that expands the ground of your slight.

The prime example is Achilles, who reacted to Agamemnon's theft of his slave-girl by raising the issue of who should govern: people with inherited positions like Agamemnon, or people with manly virtue like Achilles. That shows you the political implications of manliness. Manliness is especially political: it gives rise to politics, to the raising of political issues. There are any number of issues that might become political, because there are any number of injustices that people might react against, but don't. To choose one of these and to make a big deal of it is a political action.

Salient: Let me return to campus politics. You served for 20 years under President Derek Bok. Do you look forward to his return?

HM: President Bok will have to learn a thing or two. When he was president, he was occasionally guilty of episodes of brusqueness. Those are not tolerated today. He will have to follow very carefully the incidents that led to the fate of President Summers and be much more modest than he was before—perhaps even as modest as Neil Rudenstine.

Salient: You once said of the "innate differences" controversy, that "it was about the fact that Larry Summers was not in favor of affirmative action. That's what this whole thing is about." Is this issue still about affirmative action?

HM: Oh yes. I think that was the main issue of his entire presidency. It was his position on affirmative action, which was not verbal assurance but actual skepticism—skepticism in deed—that led to his ouster. It was his opposition to the diversity agenda that incurred the enmity of the radical minority of the Faculty who attacked him. He had enemies on one hand, critics on the other. The enemies he got from his opinions; the critics he got from his comportment.

Salient: Finally: reflecting on where Harvard has been in the last ten years, where do you see it going ten years from now?

HM: Probably down. I'll just leave it at that.