Last week, the president of the University of Michigan, Domenico Grasso, did something that should trouble anyone who cares about higher education: he waved the white flag. Facing a wave of media criticism, much of it dishonest and politically motivated, he unilaterally suspended a carefully developed grading policy that was meant to help first-year students adjust to college. The policy, designed by the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, would have allowed students in their first semester to receive their usual letter grades internally, but those grades would not appear on their transcripts and would not count toward their GPA. Instead, transcripts would show a simple pass or no credit mark. If a graduate school or an awards committee later wanted to know the actual letter grade, the information could be unmasked on request. The idea was not to coddle anyone. It was to give new students a brief grace period to learn how college works before the high-stakes machinery of GPA anxiety took over. For first-generation students, especially, this matters. They often arrive without the unspoken knowledge that others absorb from college-educated parents: how to choose courses strategically, how to manage professors’ expectations, how to recover from a bad start. The report behind the policy put it beautifully: the current system pushes students toward courses where they already know they can excel, but real learning happens through “desirable difficulties,” just beyond one’s current level. A one-semester reprieve from GPA fear was not about lowering standards. It was about clearing a little space for genuine intellectual risk.
Then the outrage machine kicked in. A Michigan news outlet covered the plan in early August, and within days the national press had descended. The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times ran mostly fair stories, noting that other elite schools have similar policies. But the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page and a chorus of right-wing social media accounts erupted in sneering mockery. A former Michigan football player compared the policy to participation trophies. A think-tank analyst claimed the real motivation was “softening academic expectations” to accommodate students admitted through diversity efforts. One Journal pundit was even more explicit, saying the university was trying to hide the underperformance of minority students in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision banning race-conscious admissions. Never mind that the policy had been discussed for years before that ruling. Never mind that nobody could explain how a cover-up could possibly extend beyond one semester. Never mind that graduate schools would still have access to the underlying grades. The narrative was too convenient: universities are soft, woke, deceitful places where standards are being eroded to make undeserving students feel good. It is the same old story, reheated for the algorithm age. And it worked. Instead of defending the policy, the university folded. The president said the plan had to be paused because of “extensive media coverage” and “distorted narratives.” When misinformation comes, the most powerful public university in the country apparently does not have the stomach to fight back.
But what could a real leader have done? The answer is simple: tell the truth, hold the line, and wait for the noise to fade. The policy was not a sudden whim. It grew out of seven years of deliberation involving faculty, students, alumni, staff, and administrators. It was a pilot program, meaning it could have been adjusted if problems emerged. And it was hardly radical. MIT and Yale Law School have long used pass/fail grading for first-year students, and their graduates seem to do just fine in the job market. If a former tight end wants to call that a participation trophy, so be it. A university president with any sense of institutional dignity could have said: we are not going to let social media dictate our academic decisions. Instead, Grasso wrote mournfully that misconceptions about “the academic strength and resilience of our students” put the pilot at risk. He seemed to believe that the answer was better messaging, as if the mob would be persuaded by a glossy brochure. The communications office, meanwhile, sees its job not as correcting misinformation but as “advancing the university’s reputation.” That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a university is for. A university is not a brand to be protected from bad press. It is a community of scholars and learners whose purpose is to ask hard questions, test ideas, and gather evidence. When that mission is threatened by know-nothing punditry, the response should be defiance, not a press release.
To be fair, the policy had internal critics too. Many faculty members were surprised by it, and some were genuinely skeptical. The dean had not consulted elected faculty committees as thoroughly as she should have, and the rollout left much to be desired. I understand that. I would have liked a fuller faculty debate before any change went into effect. But this was exactly the kind of situation where a pilot program makes sense: you try something, study the results, and decide based on evidence rather than panic. The suspension means we will never know whether students would have taken more intellectual risks when freed from GPA anxiety. We will never know whether faculty members would have graded more or less rigorously. We will never know whether second-semester students would have performed better, both academically and emotionally, than previous cohorts. That is a genuine loss. As one former Faculty Senate chair put it, the president’s directive “establishes a dangerous precedent, diminishes academic freedom, and closes off space for deliberation about the challenges that first-year students face and how best to meet them.” Grasso tried to frame the pause as an opportunity to explain the program more clearly and address legitimate concerns. But that is hard to take seriously. Are we really expected to believe that anonymous trolls on social media have raised objections that the provost and a dozen distinguished educators could not anticipate? Are we really expected to believe that the Manhattan Institute will be won over by a revised communications plan? The time to dispel misinformation was right then, with a forceful and public defense. There are only two effective responses to bad-faith attacks: ignore them or crush them with facts. The university chose a third option: surrender.
What makes this episode even more damaging is the way the president treated his own dean. Rosario Ceballo, known affectionately as Dean Rosie, had been thrown to the wolves. Several department chairs told me that Grasso, in a meeting with chairs and directors, suggested that LSA had botched the rollout and that his communications team had been caught flat-footed. The president later denied that characterization, but the accounts from multiple chairs were remarkably consistent. In nearly three decades at Michigan, I have never seen a president publicly humiliate a dean like that. It was not just unseemly; it was a violation of basic loyalty. The policy had been approved at the highest levels of the university, including by the president and provost. If the communications team was caught by surprise, that was their own failure. Did no one at the central administration anticipate that a change in grading policy, at one of nineteen schools and colleges, would attract this kind of reaction? It seems far more likely that they simply did not expect the vitriol. But surely nothing is more predictable than right-wing pundits attacking a university that has long been a target of their outrage. Michigan should have had a standard response ready years ago. Instead, the university stared at the coverage like a deer caught in headlights. This is not an isolated incident. Michigan has recently dismantled its DEI programs and withheld treatment for transgender youth at its hospital, citing threats from the federal government. Those decisions were troubling, but at least there was an external pressure. Here, the pressure was just noise. It was the Facebook comment section, amplified by cable news and opinion pages. And the university treated it as a legitimate force that must be obeyed.
At the heart of this mess is a deeper question about who governs universities. The Board of Regents, as one faculty leader told me, has no academic expertise but an insatiable appetite for meddling. Increasingly, they seem eager to please the kind of people who fund their campaigns, and they treat the president as a compliance officer rather than a defender of the academic mission. Grasso, who is stepping down at the end of the year, was in a perfect position to resist. He had nothing to lose. Instead, he chose to retreat and to take a beloved dean down with him. The new president, C. Cybele Raver, will have to decide whether she can keep the regents in their lane or whether she will let them continue to degrade the presidency into a position of total compliance. This is not just about one grading pilot. It is about whether universities can still make decisions based on evidence, deliberation, and the advice of experts, rather than the whims of the moment. If we cannot defend a modest, well-intentioned policy designed to help first-generation students find their footing, what will we sacrifice next? The firewall between politics and pedagogy has collapsed. If we do not rebuild it, the classroom will become just another battlefield in the culture war, and everyone will lose. Universities have lasted for centuries because they are supposed to be slower and more thoughtful than the news cycle. The moment we let the mob set the curriculum is the moment we stop being universities at all.