Some College Grades Need to Go Up
By Joshua T. Katz; published originally in Law & Liberty on October 8, 2026
In a world in which grade inflation is rampant on college and university campuses, it is more than a little amusing to see that the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently awarded to the two highest-ranked institutions in the “2027 College Free Speech Rankings” a … B-. Congratulations to the University of Chicago (#1, with the score 81.42) and Claremont McKenna College (#2, 80.13)!
Since neither Chicago nor Claremont McKenna makes its distribution of course grades publicly available, there is no way for an outsider to know how often B-’s appear on their undergraduates’ transcripts. But it is highly unlikely that this grade is near the mean or the mode. At Harvard, after all, almost 21 percent of graduating seniors in the Class of 2026 “reported a GPA rounded to 4.0,” and nearly nobody reported a GPA below 3.1. The statistics at Harvard’s peer institutions, about which Solveig Lucia Gold and I contributed an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal a year ago, are similar.
And yet the result of all these A’s is what Rose Horowitch calls “grade-inflation hell,” in which the possibility of any downward deviation from the norm is making students more anxious than ever. In the absence of new ways of fairly evaluating work, the extraordinary rise of artificial intelligence—which almost 40 percent of Harvard students surveyed last spring “admit to regularly using … for coursework in ways their instructor may view as inappropriate or against class policy”—is certain to push grades even higher still. It is far from obvious that noting only the words “pass” or “no credit” on the transcripts of first-semester freshmen, as the University of Michigan has been considering doing, will alleviate stress or reduce cheating, never mind make the proverbial college experience more like what it is supposed to be.
But—to return to the FIRE rankings, on which I have commented in past years—the proverbial college experience is in big trouble, so of course everybody is anxious. On top of everything else, one of the great joys of college life is largely gone: students no longer feel comfortable arguing with one another vigorously but happily about important issues, both in class and, perhaps even more so, late at night in dorm rooms.
These days, only 31 percent of students consider it never acceptable to shout people down in order to prevent them from speaking on campus, while 30 percent condone using violence, at least sometimes, for this same purpose. Meanwhile, a significant majority of students think that someone who has expressed the (conservative) belief that transgender people have a mental disorder should definitely or probably not be allowed to speak on campus, and a slight majority of students think the same of someone who holds the (progressive) belief that children should be allowed to transition without parental consent.
Amazingly, things could be worse. In fact, FIRE suggests that there are “reasons for cautious optimism” because many aspects of speech on America’s campuses seem to be not quite as terrible as a year ago. This is making lemonade out of very bitter lemons: the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, one day after the 2026 rankings were released, “had a profound impact on students nationwide,” with roughly half of the more than 2,000 undergraduates whom FIRE surveyed the following month feeling “less comfortable [than before] expressing their views on controversial topics in the class, in common campus spaces, and on social media” and “one in five even sa[ying] they were less comfortable attending class in person.”
FIRE calls particular attention to Harvard: not merely because it is the country’s most famous university but because this year it ranks #71 (D, 64.42) out of 261 institutions. Not a great showing, you’ll say—but in 2024, Harvard ranked #248 out of 248; in 2025, it ranked #251 out of 251; and last year it ranked #245 out of 257.
What accounts for Harvard’s dramatic improvement? Here are the reasons FIRE gives: the university’s “significant improvement in its score on ‘Administrative Support’” (which measures “whether students believe administrators clearly protect free speech and would defend a speaker during a controversy”), “the decay of penalties imposed for older campus speech controversies, and the absence of new penalties for new controversies.” The key is Harvard’s “new leadership” under President Alan Garber and other senior administrators, which “has made its support of the First Amendment clear.”
Still, Harvard—along with Yale (#72, 64.13) and Brown (#98, 62.54)—has earned a D, a grade that must be close to non-existent on current student transcripts. And Princeton (#176, 58.13), Cornell (#219, 55.48), the University of Pennsylvania (#227, 54.42), and Columbia (#246, 52.77) receive F’s.
Certainly academia is much more than the Ivy League. A different essay would comment on how the University of California, Davis rose from #252 (F, 47.46) last year to #24 (C, 72.55) today and how Texas State University dropped in the same twelve months from one failing grade (#112, 58.22) to a substantially worse one (#259, 47.82).
The fact is that there are depressing figures across the country, and FIRE has them for you. It awarded an F to a whopping 121 of the 261 institutions ranked in the latest survey—46.4 percent of them! And very few receive even a gentleman’s C: there are 42 D-’s, 48 D’s, 14 D+’s, 12 C-’s, 17 C’s, 5 C+’s (along with Dartmouth, also the Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus, Michigan Technological University, Vanderbilt University, and Purdue University-Main Campus), and those 2 B-’s to Chicago and Claremont McKenna. Although “the average overall score (61.36) is the highest recorded in seven years, … it still corresponds to a D-.”
This is what administrative success looks like: overall, student grades go down while FIRE grades go up.
When it comes to allowing people to speak their minds, the most significant source of light in the Ivy League appears to be Dartmouth, which ranks #6 (C+, 76.96). Dartmouth’s success is no doubt attributable in large part to its president since 2023, Sian Leah Beilock, who is an outspoken advocate of free speech. It is significant that Dartmouth ranked #224 in the 2025 and #35 in the 2026 rankings. (I am not so cynical as to believe that one cause of the rise is Dartmouth’s decision to award an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws to FIRE’s longtime president and CEO, Greg Lukianoff, at commencement this past June.) As FIRE puts it, “improvement in the rankings—even rapid improvement—is possible. It starts with strong leadership on the issue of free expression.” Beilock herself wrote this a year ago: “While rankings are only one snapshot of a college’s standing and accomplishments, I am especially proud to see that Dartmouth College ranked as the top Ivy League school for free speech by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.”
But not all presidents are like Beilock and Garber—or like Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt since 2020 and before that provost at Chicago, whose efforts have helped move Vanderbilt up in the FIRE rankings from #140 in 2025 to #7 in 2026 to #5 (C+, 77.09) now.
Take Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton, the university that U.S. News & World Report consistently ranked #1 until this year, when it fell to #2 after MIT (FIRE ranking: #86: D, 63.03). In his badly mistitled book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, published almost exactly a year ago, Eisgruber dismisses FIRE’s work in ill-argued and prejudicial terms. Read the fusillade of counterclaims fired off by FIRE’s director of research, Ryne Weiss.
“Princeton’s toxic president,” as one commentator has referred to him, is the face of resistance to the belief that our educational institutions have problems that urgently call for solutions, whether these solutions are handed down by Donald Trump and Linda McMahon or come instead from quieter work by reasonable people on campus, classical liberals and conservatives alike. In an interview with the Daily Princetonian about his new book, he asserted, “American universities are the best that they’ve ever been.” Uh huh.
Eisgruber’s views have made him a folk hero to some: last December, for example, he won the Gold Honor Medal from the National Institute of Social Sciences—the same organization that two Decembers earlier honored Anthony Fauci. But they have also brought him into conflict with many other academic leaders.
Above all, he has clashed with Vanderbilt’s Diermeier and with Andrew D. Martin, the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis (current FIRE ranking #56: D, 65.67), who have teamed up to find ways of restoring public trust in higher education—and, no doubt, take more prospective students away from Princeton. Horowitch’s widely circulated 2025 article in The Atlantic titled “The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another” is about Eisgruber and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University (FIRE ranking #120: D-, 60.57), on the one side, and Diermeier and Martin, on the other. It makes for salacious reading.
Diermeier and Martin’s commissioned “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” has in the meantime been released, to a great deal of teeth-gnashing among the academic bien-pensants. The report’s ten authors—two of them sitting Princeton professors and one an emeritus Princeton professor now at NYU—argue that much academic work shows “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
Since, according to Horowitch, Eisgruber has “all but accus[ed] them [i.e., Diermeier and Martin] of carrying water for the Trump administration,” it is worth noting that the report they commissioned claims that FIRE “now finds the chief threat [to campus illiberalism] coming from the right” rather than the left and quotes one of its senior officers as saying that the right is now “backed by the power of the federal government.” To my eyes, the assessment of the threat is inaccurate. At the same time, FIRE is doing what it has always done, namely, fighting against the suppression of free expression on both the illiberal left and the illiberal right. I don’t always agree with the organization’s priorities. But any implication that FIRE is a right-wing organization, or that a campus president who supports free speech is necessarily MAGA, is ridiculous.
In short, on all campuses, not just Princeton, this is what administrative success looks like: overall, student grades go down while FIRE grades go up.
Joshua T. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on higher education, language and culture, the classical tradition, and the humanities broadly defined.