THE PROFESSOR'S RESPONSIBILITY IS TO SAY NO AND UPHOLD STANDARDS.

That's what you're paid to do.  Preening on stage or pontificating for local television or, if you're famous enough, testifying before Congress, is what compensates you for doing your work.

How much irresponsibility is there these days?  Try Minding the Campus's David Randall.  "Grade inflation has gotten so bad that a 1968 C+ might clear the bar for a Yalie A today."  The student he refers to is, famously, our 43rd President, who might have used his academic standing self-deprecatingly.

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the "gentleman's C" has become the "gentleman's B minus" and these days, Mr Randall suggest, an A minus on the transcript is grounds for a grade appeal.

Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Mr Bush's opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, also Ivy types, earned similar grades.  Perhaps politicians, to be successful, have to have some of that hail-fellow-well-met about them, and that doesn't show up on the transcript.  I'll be nice and not ask too many questions about why Barack Obama's transcripts are deep secrets.

I'll leave the politics alone, as the column is about the bitter fruits of access-assessment-remediation-retention, which is apparently still going on although I have spared myself from having to encounter it each semester.

The rot runs deep enough that many professors may never have encountered genuinely good student work. Even at Yale, even at Harvard, something almost grammatical—produced without AI assistance—has become rare enough to inspire misplaced generosity.

I know that temptation from my own days grading college students. After all, I had to come up with curves for each exam that were sufficient to keep most of the class from failing. With essay grading, you get so happy about any sign of mental life and ability to write that you become generous with the As from sheer gratitude.

Grade with proper rigor—give no more than a C- to any essay that does not have perfect command of grammar, spelling, and punctuation—rather than just put a cap on As, and you’d flunk out a decent portion of the Ivies. You’d probably also flunk out large majorities of students in most other colleges, save a few Hillsdales. Practically speaking, it will probably take a few generations of grade deflation to get back to 1968. Teachers will need to relearn how to grade, just as students will need to relearn how to study and work.

Teachers will need to spend far more time grading. Teachers will need to spend far more time on undergraduate instruction, period, and not just fob off remedial writing to the Leninists in the composition departments. If we truly want to set in a regime of grade deflation, gleeful rigor, high admission standards, and mass flunking isn’t a sufficient answer. Professors will have to put in the hard work to make their students literate again.

Which is to say, it isn’t enough just to satirize and scorn the current generation of students. Sure, they could be a lot better students. But they have been failed—by several generations of teachers, of education administrators, of all of us Americans. We do need to eliminate grade inflation and grade more rigorously, but we should do so in a spirit of charity. And above all, we should make sure that professors work as hard to grade well as students work to deserve good grades. We all need to work together to fix what has gone wrong with college education, not just make students suffer for mistakes we made before they were born.

Well, yes.  And the institutional rot started long before militant Iranian students started chanting "Death to America!"  That noted, it is not difficult for individual professors to tighten their standards a bit, which might, in a world of "Rate My Professor" popularity contests, lead to the "it's good enough" cohort of students shunning those courses, which leads to a virtuous cycle in some classes in which students who want to be challenged rise to the challenges.  Oh, and those "Leninists in the composition departments?"  They teach neither good writing nor good political economy.