To the graduating class:
I’m sorry.
I’ll explain. I was a student at the College from 1977 to 1981, am the parent of a son who graduated in 2018, and have been a visiting lecturer since 2023.
I had a teacher when I was a student here, Professor of History Frederick Rudolph ’42, who later became a mentor and friend. One semester he excoriated a piece I wrote as writing of such poor quality that it was unrepresentative of my abilities as a student and disrespectful of his as a professor. That was a horrible note to receive. But he was right. I kept that note on the bulletin board above my desk until, decades later, the letters were faded and illegible.
Fred gave me something more valuable than an A: He gave me an education about myself. He woke me up to the possibility of what I could become.
Forty years after I graduated, I returned to the College to try to recreate the experience I had in Fred’s class for the students of today. Returning to campus has been full of wonderful surprises. So much has changed for the better. But not everything. Students arrive here with excellent high school grades, and they want the same in college. “Did I learn anything?” has become less important than, “Did I get an A?” By navigating or manipulating the system to get a better grade, they miss getting a true evaluation of their talents.
Perhaps it’s understandable that with tuition approaching the $100,000 mark, students expect to be treated as customers, and for the most part, they are. So, a great student gets an A, and an average student gets … an ‘A-’? When everyone’s a winner, when everyone gets a trophy, when everyone gets some form of an A, no one is actually at the head of the class. Why be great, when good, or less, is so richly rewarded?
In 1977, we didn’t have Student Course Surveys. You couldn’t protest your grade to a Dean because we didn’t have layers and layers of them. You could, however, have a conversation with your professor, who would never consider changing your grade, but who would be happy to explain it. Tenure-track faculty are terrified of the surveys. Tenured professors are exhausted by the endless grade protests.
No one protested their grade in my first three semesters teaching “Writing for Television” at the College. At the end of year two, I got an email from a student saying, “I would just like to know what I specifically did wrong to get a B+.”
I guess this student expected an A. I explained that a B+ indicates that you did a lot of things right, but that they could have been done better. Not so complicated.
After wrapping up the course this fall, I got an email from another student who got a B+. “This has damaged my GPA,” they wrote. I sensed a pattern. Then, in January, I got a request to meet with a dean concerning a student who was protesting their grade but wasn’t comfortable speaking about it with me directly.
This was the same student who had been comfortable enough approaching me during the semester about helping with their not-related-to-the-course screenplay idea; who was absent for a third of the course; whom I met with seven times, one-on-one, on my own time, to catch them up on missed work. I explained my grading. I explained that missing four out of twelve seminar classes exceeds the definition of “reasonable accommodation.” I thought that was enough. I was wrong.
The student then went to the College’s legal counsel with a new idea: that their grade was the result of prejudice on my part. They claimed that their civil rights had been violated. Enter the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (OIDEI).
I went to their office naïvely expecting an open — and welcome — discussion of the student’s grade. Instead, I became the subject of a four-month investigation. Every aspect of my teaching and grading had to be revisited, explained, and defended. I was asked by that same office if I’d raise the grade to the A the student thought they deserved. I was not asked about the quality of the work, which was mediocre. It didn’t matter. How I arrived at the grade didn’t matter. A student wasn’t happy. That mattered.
At the end of April, OIDEI reached its long-awaited conclusion: I did nothing wrong. There was no violation. Though it was a miserable process for me, I feel sorry for the student, who learned a terrible life lesson: Even if you do the course work poorly, the system will work overtime on your behalf.
That’s a lesson I hope the Class of 2026 will forget. Because you’re heading into a world without accommodations, extensions, and excuses — where the quality of your work is actually your responsibility. We didn’t teach you that. One of my interrogators at the OIDEI stated that, “All these students have trauma.” When an entire office operates from that assumption, the issues of students who actually are suffering and do need support are minimized. It depletes valuable resources and has led to an enormous and unnecessary administrative bloat.
You are all stronger than you’ve been led to believe by the grievance-industrial complex. It’s gonna take you a while to figure that out.
You’ll have to learn to meet deadlines, work in a noisy room, and show up when you have a headache. And you will, eventually.
I’d like to imagine a future where students come to the College to get an education, not an A. Where a C doesn’t lead to an appeal to the administration, but to a promise to yourself to try harder, and a B+ can once again mean you did a lot right. Where teachers are not afraid to teach and grade. Where accommodations go to those who need extra help to learn, not to get a better test score.
Students can’t make those changes. The administration can, by implementing substantive alterations to College policies, perhaps even in concert with other colleges and universities. But we’re not headed in that direction.
In 1981 the answer to the question, “What is the College doing?” was “preparing students for the world they’re about to enter.” In 2026, the answer is “just trying to keep the customer satisfied.” Be sure to give us five stars.
Michael Sardo ’81 is a Visiting Lecturer in English.
