A Kenyon college teacher (founded by an Episcopal Bishop in 1824) has her beat: Excerpts:
intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality...has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial...movements...animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise... representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity...Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies...Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity...our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality...are embodied and experienced."
Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. - Author is Brianna Thompson, who teaches courses in American women’s literature, queer theory and utopias/Afrofuturism at Kenyon college (founded by Episcopal Bishop in 1824). Course is Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214, https://www.kenyon.edu/academics/departments-and-majors/english/academic-program-requirements/courses-in-english/
Yet lowering standard is nothing new for Harvard.
In a Harvard Crimson article, noted conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield contended that,
"Grade inflation got started … when professors raised the grades of students protesting the war in Vietnam..." "At that time, too, white professors, imbibing the spirit of the new policies of affirmative action, stopped giving low grades to black students, and to justify or conceal this, also stopped giving low grades to white students." The problem was essentially seen as the predominance of the notion of self-esteem, "in which the purpose of education is to make students feel capable and 'empowered,' and professors should hesitate to pass judgment on what students have learned." Such assertions resulted in no small controversy.Harvard alumnus and author Ross Douthat attributed this problem partly to socioeconomic differences, and noted that "Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder", being brilliant largely in their tactics "to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort." Few people who have taught at Harvard agree with Douthat's notions. - https://www.conservapedia.com/Harvard_University
Harvard STEM courses are still rigorous! Pre-meds at Harvard are still afraid of getting a low grade in Organic Chemistry, and thus failing to get into Med School!
Then there are the Honors programs in humanities, especially History and Literature, with reputedly the smartest undergraduates at Harvard. These require a senior thesis. NO plagiarism,. please!
Graduate programs in science still require completing a rigorous and original PhD thesis based on experimental work, and defending it before a committee. PhD programs in humanities and social science also require research-based original theses, but of course there are no experiments. Plagiarism is and should be a major disqualification for such theses!
Grade inflation occurs everywhere, especially at Yale! But it won’t get you an acceptable PhD thesis!
Restoring Harvard’s honor will require such steps (at a minimum) as pulling Gay’s PhD degree for plagiarism, invalidating all her plagiarized papers, and firing her from the presidency. So far, Harvard has not been up to the challenge. Lord have mercy!