The failing of the American mind

Beginning next fall, the University of Michigan will no longer give grades to first-semester freshmen in one of its colleges. According to a story on NPR, freshmen in the university’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts will either pass or receive no credit for their first semester classes. The reason given is mental health. The college wants students to “start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” Several other schools are piloting a similar program.

These changes in student assessment are just the latest in a series of revolutions that are taking place in higher education—everything from the removal of testing as a requirement for college admission (a COVID-era contingency that has become permanent in some schools) to the various peace treaties colleges are making with generative AI use in the classroom. We could also mention the student debt crisis and the growing lack of confidence that many Americans have in the value and utility of a college education.

While I understand the concern for the mental health of students, I think removing grades from the freshmen experience is wrongheaded and counterproductive. Indeed, the greater concern runs in the opposite direction, namely, grade inflation. The only thing worse than giving no grades is giving grades away. I say this with some contrition, as the problem affects virtually everyone who submits grades each December and May. The old bell curve of excellent (A), good (B), average (C), below average (D), and failing (F) has been replaced with a highly tightened scale at the very top. The pressures of student transcripts, job placement, and graduate school acceptance rates—coupled with the pressure of student evaluations and (a term I abominate in an educational context) “customer satisfaction”—have created a culture of entitlement in student assessment.

But all of these trends point to a more fundamental problem in American culture: what social scientist Jonathan Haidt calls “the coddling of the American mind.” With this concept, Haidt is deliberately echoing the classic 1987 work by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. The problem Bloom identified, that most college freshmen enter the university believing truth is relative, hasn’t gone away, but it has been exacerbated by the compounding problem of a lack of resiliency. Students have been conditioned to believe that even the slightest discomfort to their perceived mental health should be both acknowledged and accommodated.

Mental health is a genuine human concern, as all of history’s great philosophers, theologians, pastors, and priests have known at least as well as the psychologists. But appeal to mental health has become something of a wax nose. It has become a kind of cop-out or escape clause that is ready to hand in circumstances that can best be described as normal human life. I have had students cite their mental health after a relational breakup or an especially busy week of midterms as an excuse for late or missing assignments.

As I have argued before, university education is not simply about excellent instruction, ground-breaking research, and job readiness. It is more fundamentally about virtue formation. As classical educator Martin Cothran has put it, education ought to be about teaching students how to think and what to do (wisdom and virtue). Modern educational philosophy has exactly reversed this: teaching students what to think (progressive indoctrination) and how to do (vocational skills).

Professional readiness is not an illegitimate aim of the modern university, but it must be set within the ecology of the liberal arts, classically understood: the arts and sciences that form a student into a genuinely “free” person (liber). Freedom in the classical and Christian sense was not about unchallenged, self-curated choice but about freedom from the passions and freedom for virtue. And since virtue demands repeated practice (habit) and perseverance, true freedom must include the freedom to fail—or, more to the point, the freedom to perform below one’s highest aspirations.

In short, both gradeless and grade-inflated classrooms rob students of the opportunity to grow. Policies like the University of Michigan’s proposal only intensify the trends that educators must be at pains to reverse. The inculcation of fortitude, resiliency, and self-mastery are prerequisite to a meaningful human life. Employers, clients, customers, and stakeholders won’t be as forgiving as some professors and administrators appear to be. We do our students a disservice if we don’t prepare them for the real world—a world that desperately needs fully formed human beings who actually work for a grade and learn the satisfaction of genuine accomplishment.