Your Cart is Empty
Nicole Barbaro Simovski, PH. D.
Free The Inquiry
After vague signage policies led to backlash at Boston University last month for the removal of a pride flag hanging visibly on a faculty office window, the president announced on Monday that the university will be “pausing” their “long standing, routine university policy” of removing outward-facing signs. As well-intentioned as this might be, such vague policies, inconsistent implementation, and pausing that appears viewpoint-contingent only contribute to chilled expression.
But expression policies aren’t the only thing chilling speech on campuses right now. Across the U.S. there are a variety of state-mandated and other institutional policies that are threatening academic freedom protections for faculty and their comfort in speaking freely.
Stakes are high as the Trump administration looks to rewrite the rules governing accreditation in the first of two week-long rule-making sessions starting today. The overhaul could dramatically change who is in charge of academic oversight and what they evaluate when determining whether an institution should have access to federal aid.
Right-leaning think tanks applaud the changes, released last week in a 151-page draft, calling them an overdue means to ensure campus civil rights compliance, address college costs and ensure institutions are held accountable for their students’ outcomes. But accreditation experts, left-leaning policy analysts and student advocacy groups say the lengthy regulations, while vague and abstruse, pose a major threat to the future of institutional autonomy and America’s status as the crown jewel of global higher education.
About two-thirds of grades at Harvard College last school year were A’s. That doesn’t count A-minuses, which were another 18 percent, meaning fewer than one in six grades were a B-plus or lower. You might have guessed grading at Ivy League schools was lenient, though not this lenient.
Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.
Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.
