condition versus cause

Colin Kidd: Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One particular cause of ire is grade inflation, which he blames on greater racial diversity in the student body. Untrue and unjust. His actual position is more reasonable and more interesting. Mansfield believes that back in the Sixties, when Harvard first began pursuing racial diversity in its student body, the (almost exclusively white) professoriate were reluctant to give low grades to any Black students. Some were sympathetic to students who might have felt out of place in an Ivy League environment; others were simply afraid of being called racists. But whatever the reason, a significant percentage of Harvard faculty raised the grades of all Black students. However, they…