You Are Allowed to Be Demanding Again

What made us stop, in the Harvard reporting, wasn't the 20% cap. It wasn't the student protests. It wasn't Wall Street's algorithm on GPA. It was a literature professor, Karen Thornber, redesigning her general-education course on literature and mental health, quietly saying:

"The course is also becoming more demanding. We didn't feel empowered to do that. We're under tremendous pressure from students to give A's."

If you teach, that sentence probably knocked the wind out of you. You may no longer remember which semester it started, the semester you quietly dropped the passing bar a notch, swapped out the harder reading, deleted the deep prompt from the final. You have probably been telling yourself one of the reasonable versions: I'm being kind, they're exhausted. Or: if I grade honestly they won't grow anyway, they'll just complain. Or: end-of-term reviews are what my tenure runs on.

All of those are true. You aren't faking it. What you're up against is a real, structural pressure. That the Harvard faculty admitted this out loud is a big deal, because it means even at the school with more applicants than it can turn away, teachers have been giving ground to give-more-A's. You aren't the exception. You are the norm of your generation of teachers.

But let us look with you at another line in the same reporting. A 2025 internal Harvard report found that students are picking classes by perceived easiness, avoiding hard prompts, not attending class, not doing the assigned reading, expecting a level of "flexibility" they've grown used to since Covid. Which means, every requirement you lowered, they felt. They didn't become happier. They became hollower.

There is something we especially want to say to you inside that: giving an A isn't kindness. Making the course easier isn't care. Real care is trusting the student to hold something hard and staying next to them until they do. When you lowered the bar, what you were quietly telling them was I don't think you can do it. That isn't what you meant. But that is what their gut received.

So here is something you may not have been given in a long time: permission to be demanding again. Not colder. Not harsher. Not more punishing. Permission to give an honest grade at the end of the term. Permission to put back into the syllabus the book that once shook you. Permission, at the end of one class, to ask the harder question, the one you originally wrote in and later deleted because you were afraid of the silence.

You will lose some rating points. You will get some complaints. One or two students will be angry at you, fewer than you expect. And then some of them, years later, will write to you on their own to tell you that you were one of the few adults on their whole path who didn't back down. Most people accumulate maybe three such teachers in a lifetime. You have a chance to be their third.

This coming semester, you don't have to become a different person. You just have to, right next to the "easier" version you were about to run, prepare the version that is as demanding as it should be, and pick the second one. Once. See what happens.