The Daily Signal - DEI Quotas the Final Nail in the Coffin for America’s Ivy League | Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

Add up a corrupt admissions system, a corrupt DEI industry, a corrupt therapeutic curriculum, a corrupt method of grading and a corrupt, politicized faculty, and it’s no wonder the Ivy League is in crisis and higher education is in panic. Harvard, with the help of the state of Massachusetts, whose Democrat governor is an alumnus, hopes to issue $675 million in tax-exempt bonds as applications took a 21% dive for the 2025-26 academic year, according to the Washington Free Beacon. This, coupled with rising. “grade inflation”—more and more professors giving out A’s to unqualified students—has many asking right now: Are America’s preeminent institutions of higher learning still worth their salt? Probably not, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” By that I mean, I went to a rural high school. It wasn’t that competitive, Selma High School. They would just say, “If Victor Hanson applies to Harvard, and he has an A, it’s the same A as somebody from Sacred Heart Prep School in Palo Alto, where the curriculum was much more difficult.” And they did that, and the result was they had students who could not do the work, and the faculty was confronted with the dilemma. They either had to water down the curriculum. Or they had to introduce new therapeutic courses, or they had to give 60% or 70% of the people A’s, and they could do all three at the same time, which they did. 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories like this one without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉 Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠ Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027 👉 Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel and enable notifications: https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1 👉 More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. I'd like to talk a little bit about higher education. Harvard University, which has, according to news reports, been forced to borrow against its endowment. It has the largest endowment of any university in the United States, probably of any university in the world. So it's kind of a new story. And in addition to that, remember that it's under fire from the Trump administration for what they call institutionalized anti-Semitism, but they've announced that they're very, very worried that their admissions fell

by 20,000 applicants, but more importantly, they were worried about grade inflation, and grades are over 60% A's, and just 20 years ago they were down in the 35%. And this is a shared phenomenon. Princeton is about, at the same level, the Ivy League, somewhere between 60 and 65%, maybe be a little higher or grade A. And I don't know if that counts A minuses or not, but that has gone very high. And they've tried to remedy that by limiting the faculty's issuance of A's, and they gave up. It didn't work.

There was outrage. Yale apparently had the worst grade inflation. There were reports that A and A minuses might have been up to 70 or 80 percent. Stanford won't release theirs, but there's rumors that they're up in the 60 to 70 percent category. So what's going on at these universities? Well, remember how they built their reputation. They assured us that they had the highest admission standards in the world. Three, four, five percent of tens of thousands of applicants got in.

They broadcast their SAT scores. They were up in the 98th, 99th percentile. The GPAs of the incoming class were given great inflation in high school, but also the use of advanced placement higher than A grades, they were getting 4.2, 4.3. They were inundated with valedictorians. And they said that was important because they had such a competitive, rigorous, hard curriculum

in the humanities, in the social sciences, in the applied scientists, and then things like math and biology. and the result was that they were turning out. They said the most gifted people in the world, and employers knew that, and graduate programs knew that. So they snapped up the Ivy League student that graduated because they knew to be admitted he had to be far better than anybody else.

She did, and they had one of the most rigorous curricula in the world. But what happened? Well, according to them, they inflated the grades. Now, why did they do that? Well, about 20 years ago, contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, and in the last three years, contrary to a Supreme Court ruling, outlawing racial discrimination and admissions, they adopted initially a quota system based roughly on demography.

If there were 12% blacks, 12% Latinos, then those numbers were reflected in the admissions. Now, there were two groups that they didn't worry about that might be underrepresented. You know who they were. They were Asians and white males. They wanted to get about 51 or 53% of the student body as females. But the problem was that they were now doing something that they said that, was contrary or antithetical to what they had previously said was essential for their world reputations. In other words, if you're not having meritocratic standards and you're letting people in for whatever,

it can be wealthy white kids who are related to the president or the dean or big donors in an inordinate percentage or athletes or by race or by gender or sexual. orientation or whatever it is. If it's not Merocratic and there is a number of non-merocratic admission, then that affects the curricula. And that means it filters down to the faculty member. And if he's teaching a course in Western Civ and he starts with Homer and then Virgil and maybe Venerable Bede and then Dante and then Shakespeare, he all of a sudden can't maintain that standard.

He has to either limit the number of selections or keep them and inflate the grades. Because if he would grade merocratically, he doesn't have the same quality of student body that the university claims it does and which employers have come to expect, given their reputation. So that is a crisis. Why did they lower the standards and accelerate? Well, it was an ongoing effort at diversity, equity, inclusion. It took off during the Obama administration, it was 40, 50, 60 years old, affirmative action.

But it really accelerated after George Floyd when each university tried to battle the other and show its liberal Fides by either eliminating the SAT and most of these schools did or eliminating the adjudication of your high school GPA. Why that, I mean I went to a rural high school. It wasn't that competitive, Selma High School. They would just say,

if Victor Hansen applies to Harvard and he has an A, it's the same A as somebody from Sacred Heart Prep School and Powell, the curriculum was much more difficult. And they did that, and the result was they had students that could not do the work, and the faculty was confronted with the dilemma. They either had to water down the curriculum, or they had to introduce new therapeutic courses, or they had to give 60, 70 percent of the people aid, and they could do all three at the same time, which they did. And then people started to notice that certain people were graduating from Harvard, Stanford, Yale,

and they didn't have analytical skills, they didn't have English compositional skills. They weren't the same as 20 years ago. And the reputation of these universities has plummeted. It was part also of a multifaceted systems breakdown. Under DEI, when you bring that many students in for meritocratic reasons, then you have to institutionalize reason their inability given their high school preparation. And that's what it is, high school preparation and ability to do that supposedly very rigorous college work. You have to rationalize it.

So if you're giving A's to everybody, then you're lowering the reputation of the university. But if you don't do that, then you're having people who say people who are black or Hispanic that were allowed either without SATs or with lower SATs and lower GPAs or GPAs from less competitive high school, that shows prejudicial racism on your part that they're getting lower grades. No faculty member wants to be called a racist. So then you have to pass them, and then there has to be institutions on campus

that explain away reality, safe spaces, trigger warnings, separate graduation, racial essentialism, so that faculty gets scared of grading people in a non-racialist, racially blind fashion. And if you look at the curriculum of all of these Ivy League campuses

and compare it with 40, 50 years ago, there's courses on film, there's courses on sex, there's courses on comic books, there's courses on almost anything. They're politicized courses. They're not inductive. They start with a premise that you're supposed to end up agreeing with this point of view

and we'll give you the tools to end up. And if you don't agree with us, then you're going to get a rare bee. And so we have a final problem with these uniforms. They have politicized faculty. They're not empirical. They're not disinterested. 94% identify as left wing as far as donors to either party. It's about 97% to the Democratic Party.

So they see their purpose, not as Socratic, taking students in and not letting them know what their own political views are and teaching them, A, a body of knowledge, and to be an inductive method of reasoning. They don't want that. They want to tell the student, your society is racist, sexes, homophobic reactionary. Your parents are, your churches, your community.

So we're going to be biased because we have to balance all of that, on that imbalance that you're going to go out in the world. That's not true, of course, but that's what they implicitly transmit to the students. So we're not biased. we're just countering all of the institutions in society that are not progressive like we were. Add it all up. Add up a corrupt admission system, a corrupt DEI industry, a corrupt therapeutic curriculum,

a corrupt method of grading and a corrupt, corrupt politicized faculty. And it's no wonder the Ivy League is in crisis and higher education is in panic. Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hanson for the Daily Seag. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansan.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.