The Managed University

Harvard University faculty voted recently to cap the number of A’s the instructor of any course may award. Under the new “20 plus four” formula, 20 percent of students per course, plus four additional students (a concession to small seminars), can receive the top grade. For everyone else, it becomes a scarce resource, rationed like water in a dry year.

The policy was faculty-approved, which gives it a democratic gloss. Writing in The New York Times, two Harvard economists defended it as the least bad solution to a genuine collective action problem: Faculty who wanted to grade more rigorously couldn’t do so unilaterally without putting their own students at a competitive disadvantage. Grade inflation, they argued, is what happens when individual incentives pull against collective good, like fisheries being depleted or rivers polluted. The formula has unfair cases, they conceded. But it is workable. So, they chose it.

I read this news on a Tuesday morning, which meant I had 47 unread emails from administrators waiting for me alongside it. There was the reminder to upload my syllabus to the portal—the syllabus I had uploaded the previous week, the one that I’d already distributed 30 copies of by hand on the first day of class. There was the nudge to remind my students to complete their course evaluations, followed, 12 minutes later, by a second nudge to remind them again. There was the climate and culture survey— the third of the semester, each one arriving with the same breathless sincerity. And there, glowing with institutional optimism near the bottom of the pile, a professional development session on student engagement, offered this Friday, and next Friday, and, it seems, every Friday until I die.

The Harvard story and the Tuesday inbox are the same story. I say this not as a lament but as a diagnosis. Both are indicative of what I call the managed university.

I have taught at every rung of the American educational ladder, in K–12 classrooms and community colleges, at elite research universities and large public ones, on the East Coast and the West and in the Midwest and the Upper South. I say this not to list credentials but to establish a vantage point. From where I stand, something is converging that is not supposed to converge.

For decades, the joke among university faculty was a smug one: We were not K–12 teachers. We did not punch clocks or sit through mandatory trainings or drown in the administrivia that had come to define public school teaching less as a vocation than as a compliance exercise. We had autonomy. We had tenure. We had, or believed we had, the dignity of being trusted professionals.

That joke has since expired. What replaced it isn’t funny.

The drift is easy to dismiss as mere bureaucratic bloat, an annoyance, a tax on attention, not a transformation. But the emails are only the symptom. The deeper change is structural, and the Harvard grade cap is its clearest expression.

The analysis the two Harvard economists offer is not wrong, exactly. It is simply performing the wrong autopsy. When 60 percent of Harvard grades are A’s, the figure they cite, something has indeed gone wrong. But the question worth asking is not how to engineer the grade distribution back toward a bell curve. The question is how the grade became, in the first place, a transaction rather than a conversation.

The new policy makes that conversation structurally unnecessary. Faculty are now insulated from the discomfort of explaining a B to a student who expected an A. Students are insulated from the necessity of making the case for themselves. The grade becomes a function of cohort statistics rather than individual judgment, and the professor becomes, in that moment, less a teacher than an administrator of outcomes. Everyone is protected from each other, which is another way of saying everyone is protected from the friction that learning requires.

The economists acknowledge, almost in passing, that junior faculty feared honest grading would produce worse course evaluations, lower enrollments and diminished tenure prospects. They frame this as the mechanism of inflation, which it is. What they don’t say, what the new grade capping policy actively prevents them from having to say, is that this fear did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a university that had begun treating students as customers, enrollment figures as revenue and satisfaction scores as proxies for educational quality. A grade cap doesn’t address any of that. It ensures only that the customers receive their disappointment at a regulated rate.

The K–12 system standardized grading partly out of necessity. When a teacher has 149 students and 18 minutes of prep, the rubric is not a philosophical choice but a practical one. I understand the arithmetic of it. The promise of higher education, the thing that justified its cost and its pretensions, was that it offered something different: a professor who had read your work with attention, who had opinions about the specific texture of your thinking, who could tell you not just that you had fallen short but precisely where and how and what to do about it. That promise is not being broken. It is being managed away, one policy at a time, in the name of solutions that are workable.

The Harvard economists end their piece with a vision of the future: Other universities should follow suit, employers should demand transparent grading data, a nationwide tracking system should hold every institution to account. It is a tidy, comprehensive, thoroughly depressing picture of the American university rendered legible as a sorting mechanism, its transcripts optimized for labor markets, its A’s restored to their proper informational value.

They are not wrong that the grades have become meaningless. They are wrong about what would make them mean something again.

The collective action problem is real, and it deserves a collective solution—but not this one. The lever that needs pulling is not the grade itself but the institutional incentive that corrupted it.

Course evaluations, in their current form, are the original sin: They handed students a mechanism for punishing professors who expected too much, and then universities handed those evaluations to tenure committees as evidence of teaching quality.

Faculty who want to grade honestly cannot do so unilaterally, as the economists rightly observe. But they can do so collectively. What the Harvard vote should have produced is not a quota but a compact: a facultywide commitment to remove student satisfaction scores from tenure and promotion decisions, to evaluate teaching by peer review and syllabi and the actual arc of student work over time. This is not a fantasy. Several institutions have piloted precisely this shift.

Pair that with something more uncomfortable: Universities must stop pricing themselves as luxury goods and then measuring their worth in enrollment statistics. So long as a department’s survival depends on its head count and head count depends on students choosing the easier professor, those incentives will always win. Models that reward demonstrated learning, assessed by external reviewers, by longitudinal outcomes, by something other than a satisfaction survey, exist in embryonic form. They are not perfect. But they are workable in the right direction, which is more than can be said for a quota.

You do not restore meaning to a grade with a formula. You restore it the same way it was created in the first place: by changing what we ask of the people doing the grading, and what we threaten them with if they do it honestly. That work cannot be administered. It can only, if we choose, be protected.