It’s a sign of the white-hot attention on Harvard—always, but especially now—that a faculty vote to cap A’s at 20 percent of grades at the College made international news for weeks.
The concept of too many A’s at Harvard proved to be an irresistible story. (And it was the repeated butt of jokes in speeches at this year’s Commencement.) But Harvard’s move also came at a time of self-reflection and a bit of self-flagellation across higher education, spurred by government pressure and broad public skepticism. In April, Yale released a report of its committee on trust in higher education, which urged the university to address a litany of issues from soaring costs to opaque admissions practices. At Harvard, leaders of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have been arguing that grade inflation undercuts the academic experience and the University brand; this spring, they urged their colleagues to do something about it.
“For once, the question isn’t whether Harvard is going to follow someone else’s lead,” Gates professor of developing societies Alisha Holland told colleagues at one faculty meeting. “The question is whether we’re going to take our own.”
Holland was a member of the FAS subcommittee that developed the grading proposal, which dominated campus conversations this spring—in town hall meetings, email threads, dueling op-eds, and faculty meetings so well-attended that they were moved from University Hall to the Science Center.
Students largely hated the idea: a Harvard Undergraduate Association survey in February found that nearly 85 percent of students opposed a cap on A’s. Some professors, too, argued in op-eds and faculty meetings that the cap was arbitrary and blunt, and that it would undercut professors’ autonomy and discourage students from helping one another.
But there turned out to be a quiet groundswell of faculty support for the grade inflation plan. The 20 percent cap passed by an email vote of 458 to 201—nearly 70 percent in favor. (Technically, the rule allows four additional A’s to be given in any course on top of the 20 percent cap to encourage students to take small, challenging seminars.) A vote to calculate internal honors based on average percentile rank,rather than grade-point average, was even more lopsided: 498 to 157. The faculty rejected a third proposal to augment pass-fail classes with a “satisfactory-plus” designation.
Scattered comments at faculty meetings this spring help explain the overwhelming vote in favor of a cap. Some professors complained about the ritual of students begging for higher grades. Some noted that grade inflation hurt faculty advancement: realistic grades beget negative course evaluations, which can hurt a tenure bid. Some suggested that cutting A’s would actually make students happier—that the pressure to keep up a perfect record is currently making students more anxious, not less.
After the vote, faculty leaders cheered their colleagues for taking action. Dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh called the cap “an important step toward ensuring that our grading system better serves its central purposes: giving students meaningful feedback, recognizing genuine distinction, and sustaining the academic mission of the College.”
But the true effects of the vote won’t be known for some time. Per an amendment approved at the faculty’s April meeting, the new policy won’t take effect until the fall of 2027. At that point, by dictate, there will be fewer solid A’s at Harvard College. But there will be no limit on A-minuses.
How much Harvard has acted to change its internal culture was also a theme in the courts this spring, as the federal government’s ongoing assault on the University played out in a slow-motion volley of briefs and procedural moves. A fresh round of court filings focused on the Trump administration’s continued efforts to cut off Harvard’s access to the unspent portion of more than $2.2 billion in federal research grants.
In December, the Trump administration appealed a court ruling that had restored Harvard’s federal grants on First Amendment grounds. In April, the government filed its brief in that appeal, with a new argument that sidestepped the question of free speech. Federal grants, the government said, are contracts that can be broken if they no longer align with “agency priorities,” so the case belongs in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, instead. It’s a novel tactic that, if it succeeds, would have implications for federal contracts anywhere. Harvard’s response is expected this summer.
In March, meanwhile, the Trump administration sued Harvard, seeking to cut off those same grants with a more familiar argument: that by showing “deliberate indifference” to antisemitism on campus, the University had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and forfeited its right to federal funding. “Harvard fostered and continues to foster a campus climate where hostile antisemitism and anti-Israel conduct thrives,” the government wrote in its complaint, putting much of the blame on “student-on-student harassment.”
But in their motion to dismiss, Harvard’s lawyers argued that the government had completely ignored a year’s worth of University actions to change the campus climate. The suit is “a snapshot in time that does not exist today,” they wrote, noting that it drew nearly all of its evidence from the University’s own report on antisemitism, published a full year earlier.
Spurred by the self-reflection in that report, Harvard’s lawyers wrote, the University has since made palpable changes: issuing new guidelines for protests and demonstrations, imposing discipline on policy violators, promoting viewpoint diversity, and incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into non-discrimination policies and trainings.
It also made confronting antisemitism—as it rises worldwide—the subject of official events, most notably a Harvard-sponsored symposium on antisemitism and universities, held in May at the Rubenstein Treehouse. (An earlier conference on antisemitism at the Treehouse in April, sponsored by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, had been mandated by a 2025 legal settlement between Harvard and that group.)
Has Harvard acted enough? Too much? It depends on who you ask. Changing rules isn’t the same as changing minds. And because everything Harvard does is scrutinized, critics have viewed every hiring move and honor bestowed at this decentralized University as a signal of its conviction or lack thereof. Still, the campus mood was indisputably quieter than it has been in recent years. At Commencement, a smattering of pro-Palestinian signs and keffiyehs popped up, visible but largely unacknowledged.
At the main Commencement ceremony, undergraduate orator Noah Eckstein ’26, a Jewish student from a multireligious family, spoke emphatically about the need, not for agreement, but for respect and understanding. In a complicated world, that feels like a universal goal. Achieving it will be a messy and ongoing process—because universities are complicated, and expression is free.
