Since When Does Trump Care About Grades?

Last week, the Trump administration outlined a vision for a new federal compact with American universities.

The deal outlined a smorgasbord of demands to nine American universities — Harvard not included — in exchange for preferential access to federal grant money. It included some asks you’d expect — cap foreign enrollment, protect conservative voices, end racial affirmative action — but it also required signatories to agree to crack down on grade inflation.

On its face, this is an odd request coming from a president who allegedly cheated his way into college before starting the for-profit, unaccredited Trump University before it was shut down after a litany of lawsuits (Trump denies any wrongdoing on both fronts). Naturally, Trump University did not offer grades.

Still, if Trump’s attacks on elite universities end up reviving a serious conversation about academic standards, it would be an irony worth welcoming.

The question, then, is whether this sudden concern reflects a genuine principle or just the repackaging of an old anxiety. Maybe the right is sincerely concerned about a recent trend in academia. After all, as recently as 2021, 79 percent of grades at Harvard were in the A-range.

But the excess of A’s been a perennial subject of moral panic on campus since letter grades were implemented. In 1894, Harvard’s Committee on Raising the Standard authored a report which decried grade inflation. The Committee believed grades in the “A” and “B” range were often given too easily — “Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity” — attributing the ease of earning high grades to cheating.

Nearly a century later, a 1975 Crimson news article opened with a quote from former professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 that could have been (and likely was) given yesterday: “‘If you give a student too high a grade, it leads to kind of corruption...which is bad for him.”

Indeed, in the early aughts, while Mark E. Zuckerberg was taking introductory computer science and the Bush administration was trying to reconstruct Afghanistan, the Editorial Board of The Crimson was calling for the creation and enforcement of broad standards of grading quality in response to rising GPAs.

A 2022 analysis of historical Harvard GPAs shows an almost monotonic increase since the data begin in the late 19th century. The persistence of grade inflation suggests that the controversy is less about any single generation of students and more about how grading itself reflects changing ideas of fairness, merit, and competition.

In part, the contemporary partisan dynamic may tie into broader education politics. The activist left has long been suspicious of grading practices. To many left wing identitarians, racial disparities in outcomes are proof that the practice is de facto discriminatory. To others on the economic left, grading emulates deplorable, capitalistic ideals.

Even Mansfield — dubbed “Harvey C-minus Mansfield” for his notoriously strict grading practices — seems to have a similar diagnosis. In the 1975 news story, Mansfield attributes left-wing distrust of grading to an ideology which believes that an ideal society is one without competition. As grades are the symbol of competition, they therefore must go.

Perhaps there’s a symmetric disposition in conservatism in favor of grading that accompanies a veneration of competition and the ethic of hard work. You would be hard pressed to encounter such virtues in the Oval Office. Still, it may be a natural fit for the President’s Fox News-watching audience.

It’s fashionable to suggest that this is a cynical attempt by Trump to throw everything he’s got at the academy — and that very well could be the case.

But perhaps the administration, seeing the limits of brute force, is trying to appeal to a broader coalition for reform among universities. Maybe MAGA has realized that whatever they accomplish by holding a gun to elite universities can be undone when they’re out of office and the gun is out of their hands. Top University brass may wrinkle their nose at calls to “MAGA-fy” higher ed, but a call to reinstate academic rigor and crack down on grade inflation is something influential professors like Harry R. Lewis ’68 and Lawrence H. Summers ’82 have supported for years.

If the Trump administration swaps maximalist hostage-taking for more subtle and fundamentally reasonable asks, it may be appropriate to reconsider Harvard’s stance. If the Oval Office has changed course and opted for a project of durable institutional reform, that would be a nice change of pace.

For now, though, those are pretty big ifs.

Benjamin Isaac ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House.