Grade Inflation and What Universities Are For

What is the purpose of a university? People ask this question all the time in conferences about academic freedom and the future of higher education. But an institution like the academy has different purposes for different people. And this is what we should expect in the modern world. A company likely has one purpose for its customers, another for its employees, another for its shareholders, and maybe a fourth for society at large. So too with academia. But do these varying purposes have any common thread?

Students attend college and undertake further university study primarily to earn credentials. For society, too, one of the best things about a university is that it distinguishes some people and documents as especially trustworthy, giving them a certain kind of imprimatur. Academics, of course, are happy to receive their salaries, but in general they work at universities for two reasons. The first is that it is a “high status” job that puts them in the upper ranks of what Musa al-Gharbi (following Pierre Bourdieu) calls the “symbolic capitalists”; so they receive some sort of social distinction by virtue of their employment. The second is that university professors enjoy certain privileges, collectively termed academic freedom. These privileges give professors the authority to bestow distinctions as they see fit; at least in theory, nobody can tell an academic which books ought to be on a syllabus, which papers ought to pass peer review, which topics they ought to research, which positions they ought to take on those topics, and so on. The credentials they control, and the standards they employ to evaluate candidates, are up to them.

If a university were a factory, its churning machines and coughing chimneys would be working to manufacture distinctions—a grade, a degree, a credential, an honour, a stamp of approval, a letter of recommendation. In fact, this is the central industry-related metaphor for the university: a “diploma mill.” But the mocking nature of the phrase “diploma mill” also identifies a potential internal tension. A university cannot be factory-like in its approach to its product. Mass-producing honours and distinctions strips them of meaning. To produce credentials, a university must make distinctions, by honouring some things and not others. It must, in other words, impose standards.

Here are a few stories you might have read recently:

• The State of New York is removing its famous Regents exams as high-school graduation requirements.
• According to the Harvard Crimson, the dean of Harvard College, David Deming, “suggest[ed] that artificial intelligence be integrated into ‘writing-intensive’ courses.” He wants to “avoid ‘the AI-detection business because it damages trust between faculty and students.’”
• Harvard is also considering a policy that would automatically change A grades to A-minuses if professors refuse to abide by an existing policy that caps the maximum number of A grades at twenty percent of a class, plus four.
• At the University of California, over 3,000 faculty members signed two open letters supporting the reintroduction of a standardised-test admissions requirement. Citing a UC San Diego report, one of the letters states: “in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort.”

And, of course, we must mention the enormous scandal at the University of Cambridge, in which a professor, Jason Arday, was credibly accused of plagiarising large parts of his published work and fabricating many details of his life story. Although Cambridge’s vice-chancellor initially promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into Arday’s hiring, that inquiry has since been replaced by two narrower reviews. The work of scholars whose doctoral theses Arday examined has also fallen under scrutiny; independent journalist Benjamin Ryan has noted that the doctoral theses that Arday approved or reviewed include “an epic poetry-slam” in “an autoethnographic style” and a research project that amounted to interviews of “six people [the author] knew, including her aunt.”

I’m a professor myself, and I’ve just gone through faculty orientation at a new institution. At this event, I was trained in a mindset that other academics tell me is now the norm. We were told that “rigour needs to be balanced by care” and “a failing student means a failing professor.” Friends and colleagues who have failed students or delivered them to disciplinary proceedings for plagiarism or AI usage warn that evaluating students in this way may subject a professor to their university’s enormous and lawsuit-allergic bureaucratic apparatus. Everything in the university seems to be dead set against making distinctions. It is as though the institution has thrown a wrench into the works of its own machinery.