Those who argued that universities should adopt market values and treat higher education as a private good now complain about the inevitable outcomes.

Pain looks great on other people.
That’s what they’re for.

Lyrics from the song “I Was Wrong”
written by Andrew Eldritch and performed by The Sisters of Mercy

One might think think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, and news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fox Media, would have more important things to think about than a university changing its grading policy.

Given everything going on in the world these days, it’s hard to see how these organizations would care that much about a single university’s grading policy.

Turns out, they care a lot about the University of Michigan deciding to grade first-year classes on a pass-fail basis instead of letter grades. They care so much that they’ve reported extensively on it and offered multiple opinion pieces and commentary.

In a normal world, it wouldn’t be viral media coverage. Those directly involved and affected would discuss university grading policies, and it would involve dialogue. But no. Instead, we have us-versus-them thinking, marked by strawman debates and sides that align themselves with major political parties.

It’s bizarro-world. In the new normal, the issue becomes fodder for pundits who claim to see deeper than anyone on the front lines.

Pundits and media outlets that pick up and expand on these views often imply, if not directly state, that grading changes are part of a moral crisis sweeping America. Pass-fail grading reflects a faculty ideology that prioritizes student feelings over learning, sacrifices rigor at the altar of inclusion, and frames dropping letter grades as part of a “woke ideology” that is destroying higher education.

It’s a nice story, as far as stories go, but it follows a traditional format: villains who create a crisis that threatens humanity, and a hero who saves the day. Those of us who identify with the hero are heroes, and those who identify with the villains are villains.

The problem with that way of thinking? The idea that the “hero” could have contributed to the crisis makes no sense.

The fodder starts with a simple hook: “Universities and colleges are no longer providing grades for students! Do you agree with that?” When you’re presented with the question, “no” is the more reasonable answer, and I don’t disparage anyone who goes with it. But once you’re hooked, and ideally agitated, the next thought is “Who did this?!”

The answer is obvious, isn’t it? A coalition of faculty has taken over higher education. They coddle students. They have lost touch with rigor. They don’t value merit. They are socialists who feel good grades should be distributed evenly amongst all students.

Dropping grades is easier than giving everyone A’s and lets everyone feel good about themselves. Socialist faculty (likely Marxists) are clearly far-left democrats and, logically, if you don’t like the new grading policy, you favor values that are represented by the far-right.

Grading becomes a political act. How you view it reflects your political alignment and an underlying moral stance (merit vs coddling).

It’s no surprise these days that everything gets tied to a political stance. The idea that someone who leans left, and I do, could oppose the new grading policy doesn’t fit the narrative. The idea that someone who leans right could have contributed to the new grading policy is even more alien to the narrative.

That is especially true of right-leaning think tanks. How could anything they promoted in the past, and continue to promote, lead to something they vilify today? How indeed?!

As a faculty member, I’ve watched grading standards change from the front lines. Colleagues from multiple institutions have confirmed what I’ve seen. Those of us in the trenches have seen a different world unfold than those in the C-suites of well-funded think tanks. We can confirm this reality by tracking how average grade points have risen from the 1980s to the present (a span far longer than the timeframe of “woke grading policies”).

If forced to put a blanket cause on the changes, as pundits like to do, that cause is far more connected to capitalist values than to socialist ideals.

Funny enough, many critics railing against grading policy changes have argued that higher education should apply capitalist values. And there, in short, this is the paradox: Critics argue that a result of something they argued for is something to argue against and blame on someone else. It’s all those other people.

Higher education shifted from a public to a private good starting in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration adopted neoliberal policies that privatized once-public institutions. These policies continued under Democratic and Republican leadership, and public universities became public in name only.

They now operate as private businesses competing with one another. Think tanks approve that metamorphosis. They have long argued that universities and colleges need to be privatized and run like businesses. What is the purpose of these businesses? To make a profit — well, duh — don’t you know what the word “business” means?

OK, let’s rephrase: How do these businesses make a profit? By serving customers. Who are the customers? Those paying tuition. Wanna run a good customer service business? Keep customers happy. Wanna go out of business? Upset the customers.

Why have grade point averages climbed since the 1980’s? Simple stories about coddling professors and woke policies miss (or ignore) an equally simple answer: Because it keeps customers happy and satisfied. Enhanced satisfaction comes from removing the need to go to the manager for the A+ because the faculty clerk gave you a B- (they need to be fired). So, drop grades altogether – it’s more efficient, and what business doesn’t want efficiency.

But wait, the think tank pundits say, “It’s still those coddling and/or communist faculty giving those inflated grades to students who don’t deserve them, so it can’t be that adoption of privatized business practices is to blame.” The pundits, who know how power structures work, should know better (they likely do, but would rather you didn’t).

As universities became business, they adopted corporate power structures. The hierarchy became vertical.

Administrators became “Leaders,” while those who could legitimately be called leaders (Presidents, a VP or two, a Provost) became Executive Leadership (and their numbers also grew – my own university now has 13 Vice Presidents). Faculty became employees who serve student customers.

Leadership wants satisfied customers. Good grades are a part of that. After all, a grade reflects the level of learning that occurred, a product the customer paid for. Customers want the best version of the product. University leaders don’t teach (that runs counter to the title of educational leader).

So they can’t directly give the grades customers want, and, unfortunately, faculty generally oppose soft grading standards (they teach topics they research and write about, so they value that knowledge and don’t want to degrade it by rubber-stamping its value).

But no worries. Good company leaders know how well soft coercion works to get employees to follow new rules.

Universities now allocate budgets to departments based on how many students they get into their classes. To give a sense of how non-woke and pro-business that is, my university put this budget model in place after we hired McKinsey & Company as budget consultants (hard to think of a more hyper-capitalist company).

Another pro-business move is empowering customers through student class reviews. Reviews are the main way future customers rate classes (all 5-star reviews on yelp.edu will maximize the customer base). So, if you’re some high-minded professor who holds to “old-school grading,” then you will cost your department money.

Odds are high you will be encouraged to be “more realistic” in your grading or someone else will come in and teach your class. Grade points will rise, and they may rise to the point that it starts to look a bit silly, so leadership may drop them.

It’s not about “woke” or “coddling” or a society that has become “anti-merit-based.” It’s just business, bro.

Universities and colleges are out there hustling against each other; they’re just playing the game. It’s the higher-education free market neoliberal utopia that right-wing think tanks dreamed of starting in the 1980s.

If all those folks who argue for privatizing higher education and running universities and colleges like businesses still want to complain about grading, then I trust they will also complain about all those other private customer service businesses giving customers what they want in a competitive market.

I am not holding my breath.

I am also not holding my breath for any far-right pundit or talking head to step up and say, “If my own kid got an F in a first-year class, I’d be cool with that” or “My kid didn’t deserve that 4.0 GPA.” No. The narratives they do spin about who is being “coddled” by “woke professors.”

It’s those undeserving other kids who got into college not on merit. Just as privatizing once-public goods could never lead to downsides, supporters of it could never gain an unfair advantage.

Not like all those other people.

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Cover artistic presentation courtesy of Awantha Artigala.

Adrian Lenardic, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA. ajns@rice.edu