Harvard Students Weep at Being Told They’re Expected to Learn

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, October 30, 2025

 

Good morning, readers! I bring you the best news of the week: Harvard students are rending their garments in despair at the mere threat of being required to attend class and study. The Harvard Crimson reports this morning that campus freshmen are currently reeling from a new University report on Harvard’s notoriously lax grading system, which has been debased so heavily in the 21st century that the median grade is now an A. The report recommends changes to “restore the integrity of our grading,” and these are long overdue.

 

Harvard is not the only school where grade inflation has rendered distinctions in quality among students functionally impossible to determine from a transcript. This reflects a decades-long shift in attitudes as elite schools have become ever more expensive and admissions committees have been glutted with ultra-manicured “perfect” applicants, created on paper by college admissions counselors for wealthy families. A Harvard transcript, in this new world, is no longer intended as a record of academic achievement; the degree itself is the prize, a class credential for admission into America’s new Ruling Elite.

 

And right now the kids are absolutely losing their marbles over the realization that they might have to, you know, study in school. From The Crimson, some utterly choice quotes:

 

“The whole entire day, I was crying. I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best. It just felt soul-crushing.”

 

“What makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars. Now we have to throw that all away and pursue just academics. I believe that attacks the very notion of what Harvard is.”

 

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded. If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

 

My first observation is that I am shocked some of these people were willing to volunteer their names for attribution on these quotes. (I have spared them further humiliation by not using their names here.) My second observation is perhaps more surprising: As strange as it seems, I actually understand how kids of this generation must feel about having the rules changed on them midway through the game. Like being ripped off.

 

I find the current intellectual standards on college campuses appalling myself, but that is my luxury as a 45 year old who went through this rigamarole back around the turn of the century. Meanwhile these are the rules this generation was raised under and adapted their lives toward. This is how they were taught to play the game. To them, the time for “striving” was supposed to be over. That was high school — admission to Harvard is supposed to be the reward for all that unnatural youthful effort, not an invitation to do even more work! Harvard is the gravy train — a time to slack off and network with the rich and well-connected. Now they have to work. Oh my, boo hoo.

 

But my sympathy is distinctly limited — and not merely because, as a Johns Hopkins and UChicago man, I have an abiding contempt for intellectual softness. It’s because we have seen the result in society after these children graduate from college . . . while remaining, effectively, children: unchallenged, untested, with no demonstrable intellectual achievements or revealed weaknesses.

 

For high school students, college is now branded as a journey of “self-discovery,” a four year vacation from the real world. But part about discovering one’s place in the universe is discovering one’s own limitations — I learned mine throughout a very checkered undergraduate career myself, and I wouldn’t be here without having occasionally massively failed at something I tried.

 

It’s easy to laugh at overemotional Harvard freshmen discovering to their dismay that they didn’t win life’s race with a mere acceptance letter from an Ivy League school — and it’s okay to as well, because these people really do come off as pampered softies — but they would be wiser to look at this as an opportunity to actually test their skills before they totter off into the world unprepared — and get savaged by it. The game never really changes, it only gets fiercer as you get older.