E PLURIBUS UNUM:

THEN AND NOW: MANSFIELD: Gwen Ifill speaks with Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard government professor, about how Americans have changed since Sept. 11, 2001. (Newshour Online, September 13, 2002, PBS)

GWEN IFILL: Harvey Mansfield came to Harvard 50 years ago as a freshman and never left. As a professor of government he's made a name for himself as an expert on de Tocqueville and Machiavelli. But he is also deeply involved in shaping modern conservative political thought. He has had the ear of Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, and from his perch at Harvard he has often been at the center of campus debate, arguing against affirmative action, multiculturalism, feminism and academic grade inflation. We spoke with him at Harvard.

GWEN IFILL: Here we sit on Harvard's campus, which is supposed to be a hot bed of debate-- cultural, intellectual, all kinds of debate. A year after September 11th, has that been the case?

HARVEY MANSFIELD: Not at all. There has been a great silence at Harvard this past year. For the most part, the students and the faculty have had nothing to say at all. There's been no anti-war outcry. I think that Harvard people are stunned and shocked. They are full of grief and anger. There's a kind of towering anger. I think both these sentiments they share with the rest of the American people, but they haven't found a way to understand this, and I think the reason is that our dominant opinion of multiculturalism doesn't seem to have worked out.

GWEN IFILL: Now, what do you mean by that? What does what happened on September 11th have to do with multiculturalism?

HARVEY MANSFIELD: Multiculturalism means that all cultures can be included in a community, and this attack on 9/11 seems to be a grand challenge to that happy notion. Here, these people are not just others whom we can understand if we look hard at them and see that underneath them they're really like us. No, they're different from us. They're our enemies.

There are three interesting ideas developed in this interview with Bill Kristol's mentor: the first, above, concerns multiculturalism; the second concerns the proper role of government; the third, the question of whether civil liberties should first and foremost protect the minority or the majority. On these questions Mr. Mansfield appears to be right, wrong, and right, respectively.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2002 9:11 AM