Harvey Mansfield: evaluation

Transcript context

…In general, your conversations with your students, and you have many of them, right? Yes, I have. They’re not all that different. I don’t think that the students in my classes have been that different through the 61 years I taught—in character, and in interest, and in ambition. Women came along, black students came along, Asian students came along. Those were all differences of ethnicity. In character, I find them remarkable and easily attracted, in a way. They see the books that I assign and answer to my remarks and try to put their own lives in some kind of relationship to those great books. They don’t all become professors; most of them lawyers and businessmen, but they’ve found something that is valuable and will serve them the rest of their life, give them something to do in their spare time and give them a kind of guide for what they’re working at. I always say to them, do something that you can be proud of. That’s pretty general advice. I think it enables a young man or woman to do his or her own thinking and yet come out with something that is solid and objective and praiseworthy. You’ve argued in writing that manliness has declined. You don’t see that in your students over time, or you do? Less courage, or how is that evolving?…

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