Harvard graduate and professor Harvey Mansfield is a longtime vocal opponent of grade inflation at his alma mater. In 2013, Mansfield, after hearing from a dean that "the most frequent grade is an A", claimed to give students two grades: one for their transcript, and the one he thinks they deserve. He commented, "I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade". In response, Nathaniel Stein published a satirical "leaked" grading rubric in "The New York Times", which included such grades as an A++ and A+++, or "A+ with garlands". In his 2001 article in the "Chronicle of Higher Education", Mansfield blames grade inflation on affirmative action and unqualified African American students: "I said that when grade inflation got started, in the late 60's and early 70's, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well." He also claimed that he did not have figures to back up his claims, but he is convinced that grade inflation began with African American students getting grades which were too high. "Because I have no access to the figures, I have to rely on what I saw and heard at the time. Although it is not so now, it was then utterly commonplace for white professors to overgrade black students. Any professor who did not overgrade black students either felt the impulse to do so or saw others doing it. From that, I inferred a motive for overgrading white students, too."