He first observed grade inflation as a young professor during the Vietnam era. “When I started to call it out, I didn’t think it was that important. I thought it was just a symptom. But not now.” Thanks to grade inflation, “a professor is unable to pass judgment on a student. And what that turns into is a desire to be rid of judgment altogether and to pass judgment against those who pass judgment. The result is an aggressive relativism.”
As Mr. Mansfield tells it, grade inflation had two causes in the late 1960s. “One was the Vietnam War, when a criterion for being drafted was how you stood in your class.” Professors, “out of opposition to the war and sympathy for the students, kept grades high.” The other cause was the arrival of academically unprepared black students. “Nobody wanted to give a C to a black student,” he says, “and if you didn’t do that, then you couldn’t give a C to a white student.” These two factors caused an “upward draft that raised grades. Then after a while it became routine, because everybody likes it. Students like it, parents like it.”
The corrosive effects are evident. “If you’re going to give almost everybody an A, you can’t ask them to do a lot of work, because you’re going to give them an A anyway.” Courses become less demanding: “Three papers in a semester becomes two, the reading goes down, and students realize that they’ve got a lot of extra time. Suddenly, their lives become filled with extracurricular activities, which explains the present glut in activism.”
The road to the encampments “passes through relativism into the opposite of relativism, the willingness to denounce without seeking evidence.” The grade-inflated young embark on an intense search for “commitment, by which you embrace a position without reasoning your way to it.” The mobs who set up encampments “don’t make suggestions, they make demands,” and that is “a consequence of progressivism. When you make progress, you foreclose the questions that you’ve decided.”
Mr. Mansfield also argues that the ills of grade inflation have seeped into wider American society. “One of the things grade inflation does is to rob students of knowledge of what they’re good at, and not so good at.” Ostensible success in school “doesn’t tell employers whether the graduates of college are good at something. It robs us of necessary information.”
That’s bad for democracy, Mr. Mansfield says, “because it makes society attempt something—or satisfy itself that it’s done something—that is impossible, which is to do away with human inequalities.”
