Welcome to Harvard, where studying is now a hate crime

News broke last week that Harvard University — that ancient temple of American prestige and intersectional pride — may finally attempt to curb its notorious grade inflation. For decades, Harvard has handed out A’s like party favors at a preschool graduation. But now, administrators seem to fear the public has noticed that every graduate’s transcript reads: Congratulations! You’re brilliant.

Naturally, the students have responded with calm reflection and humility.

The American university had one job — to cultivate wisdom and virtue. If Harvard students now treat studying as oppression, maybe it’s time to grade the universities themselves.

Just kidding. They’re in full moral meltdown — which is remarkable, since most of them deny morality exists unless it’s part of an identity rubric. Touch their grades, though, and suddenly they rediscover absolute truth, glowing with divine fire.

What provoked this crisis of the soul? The rumor — merely the rumor — that they might have to study.

One distraught undergraduate complained that stricter grading would force students to spend time on academics instead of extracurriculars. And as every Harvard student knows, college is all about extracurriculars. Academics are a high-school hazing ritual — a price of entry to the elite club where you never have to study again.

Other students reportedly spent the day crying. It’s a hard life.

When they lamented losing time for extracurriculars, some surely meant yachting. Others meant activism. Who will dismantle “colonizing heteronormativity” if the revolution has to pause for midterms? Who will liberate the oppressed from the tyranny of citations?

Their outrage, ridiculous as it sounds, reveals at least three uncomfortable truths about the American university system — and the students it produces.

1. They worked hard once so they never have to again.

Some students said they nearly killed themselves to get into Harvard. Not to study there — don’t be ridiculous! — but to ensure that they’d never need to study again.

If you’re an employer expecting a Harvard graduate to be a disciplined thinker, brace yourself. You may be hiring someone who hasn’t cracked a book in years. Many of them majored in activism and minored in demanding that you pay them to keep doing it.

These students treat the workplace as an extension of campus — a new platform for “advocacy,” complete with your office space, Slack channels, and HR department. You wanted an employee. You may get an organizer.

2. Entitlement isn’t an accident — it’s the admissions policy.

Harvard attracts a particular type: students convinced that excellence is their birthright and that hard work is a microaggression.

Some even claim that “work ethic” must be decolonized as a relic of whiteness — a fragile idea until you remember they say it while demanding an A for not working. One almost admires the nerve.

We should stop treating “Harvard graduate” as a compliment. It’s becoming a warning label. These students expect to skip effort, skip merit, skip discipline — and demand that you “check your privilege” if you object.

Why wouldn’t they? Harvard built an entire institutional culture around their sensitivities. The modern university no longer shapes students; it rearranges itself around their demands.

3. The university system has failed.

The Harvard meltdown exposes a national rot. For decades, Americans have been told that college is essential for success. Universities responded by expanding enrollment, inventing dozens of useless “studies” degrees, building administrative empires, and raising tuition to swallow every loan dollar available.

The result?

Now we’re mass-producing indebted graduates with inflated expectations of high-paying careers and no knowledge or skills to justify either. Education has become a luxury accessory — a handbag whose value lies in the logo.

To test the system’s bankruptcy, try asking a recent Ivy League graduate:

• What is wisdom?
• What is the highest good?
• How did your education make you a more virtuous person?

You’ll likely get a breathless word salad about “advocating for marginalized identities and dismantling structures of oppression.” Ask how that helps anyone achieve the good, and you’ll get a vacant stare fit for a zoning map.

Of course, technical fields like engineering still demand real work. But those are small islands in a vast sea of bureaucratic waste. Most universities now operate as billion-dollar community centers with a few classes on the side — entertainment disguised as education.

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Photo by VCG / Contributor via Getty Images

Can the system be saved?

Maybe, but don’t bet on it.

You can’t “hire your way out” of a faculty that’s 97% left or far left. That’s not an imbalance; it’s a monoculture. And monocultures don’t reform themselves.

But the reckoning is coming. Enrollment is falling, budgets are exploding, and public trust is collapsing. The only thing keeping many universities alive is their ability to convince students that identity activism and LGBTQ+ advocacy are transcendent educational callings.

The solution is simple: Stop paying for the nonsense. No one is obliged to spend $80,000 a year to hear a gender-theory lecturer attack the biblical definition of marriage. No law, moral or otherwise, requires funding your own indoctrination.

Let them lecture to empty rooms.

The American university had one job — to cultivate wisdom and virtue. If Harvard students now treat studying as oppression, maybe it’s time to grade the universities themselves.

And the report card is long overdue.