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Harvard’s decision to cap A grades signals an overdue reckoning with grade inflation and declining standards.

Conservatives are right about falling standards; liberals are right about the need for a cultivated citizenry.

One-sided thinking in the classroom undermines trust in higher ed and limits students’ intellectual growth.

Harvard’s recent decision to cap the number of A grades in undergraduate courses is a welcome, albeit overdue, acknowledgment of a problem that has been festering for years: rampant grade inflation and the slow erosion of academic standards.

As a professor with nearly 30 years of experience across four different institutions, I have watched this decline with growing concern. What was once exceptional has become commonplace. In a national survey of faculty at public universities that my colleagues and I conducted, nearly 40 percent admitted to routinely inflating grades, and about one-third acknowledged watering down their course content in recent years.

This is not a healthy state for higher education.

A Post-Tribal Perspective

Today’s conversation about higher education is deeply tribal. Conservatives often see a system captured by ideological conformity; sprawling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies; and lowered standards. Liberals tend to fault corporatization and inequality while........

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