Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, students and faculty, alumni and parents, lend me your ears, for I have come upon an easy and obvious solution to one of the most pressing issues facing Harvard today—nay, facing all of undergraduate education. This absolutely burning exigency, this situation which threatens to topple everything that is good and pure about the rearing of students, is of course—I shudder even to mention the term—grade inflation.

Various antidotes to this poison, various remedies for this illness, various tonics for this disease have been suggested. Some have propounded the idea that all classes should be curved, others that professors should be held personally accountable for the spread of grades in their courses, still others that each department should police itself to root out the softies in its ranks.

But all of these suggestions, if implemented, would amount to little more than superficial window-dressing; they are hopelessly myopic, and do not cut to the heart of the issue. At best, the above solutions would temporarily check grade inflation, would sweep the proverbial mess under the rug, would cover the thick cracks in the house that is Harvard with merely a thin layer of paint.

The real issue here cannot be addressed by individual professors and departments; rather, the problem is with those people in the admissions office who, contrary to all the best interests of this institution, dare to admit a better and better class every single year. In fact, it is likely the case the admissions office has failed to admit an entering group of frosh worse than the previous year’s class for many years now. This, of course, blatantly disregards the fact that such an audacious and unchecked policy of enrolling the country’s brightest students year after year is likely a leading cause of higher grades here.

The admissions office ignores all the obvious signposts indicating the students they admit are going to cause grade inflation—something that Harvard’s rival institutions seem to be much more keenly aware of. Each year, the folks over at Byerly Hall blithely send out letters of acceptance to two, three and often four times as many Presidential Scholars, National Merit Scholars and USA Today All-USA High School Academic Team members as any other school. How in the world are we supposed to even stand a chance of keeping grades healthily deflated when a quarter of admitted students have perfect or near perfect SAT scores? How indeed are we to keep our grades healthily deflated when year in and year out nearly every well-known college-ranking publication dubs Harvard the most “selective” school in the nation? Something is far, far amiss here, dear readers. Indeed, it is a sad day when high achievers are allowed to seep into the infrastructure of a school and ruin its reputation by running up its grades.

Sad indeed, but also preventable. How? In order to effectively stem grade inflation, the admissions office must take positive and real steps towards reducing the academic quality of future classes—otherwise, grades will continue to inflate, like so many balloons, and we shall all be doomed.

On a similar note, it is with the heaviest of hearts that I see honors being awarded to so many of Harvard’s graduating seniors—91 percent last year! The Boston Globe, in a recent expose on this subject, revealed the truly shocking data that at other schools in the Ivy League, fewer than half of students graduate with honors. Indeed, at Cornell the number was lower than 10 percent. Some naive people have suggested that these differences are meaningless and taken out of context—that more students graduating with honors at Harvard simply indicates that honors means something different here from other places.

But the cold hard truth is that giving honors to such a high percentage of students is the inherently evil and deleterious to any institution that engages in such practices. Indeed, if all science majors in a school were more talented than Albert Einstein, if all Humanities majors were brighter than Aristotle, if all Social scientists dwarfed Adam Smith, it would still be completely inappropriate to allow more than 25 percent or so to graduate with honors. Of course, to untangle the honors imbroglio Harvard could always just impose strict quotas on the numbers of seniors each year who can graduate with honors, but that is trimming the branches of the weed rather than cutting out its roots. Instead, it seems much more effective (not to mention more fair and even-handed) to simply lower the level of ambition and talent of our students until only about 1 in 4 are willing or able to write a thesis; only then will we effectively deal with the overabundance of seniors graduating with decorations on their diplomas.

Unfortunately, it seems we are nowhere near reaching the Elysian Fields of lower grades and rates of honors—something which, as we have seen, could be achieved so very easily. Perhaps the most irksome thing of all is that the Admissions Office seem to feel absolutely no shame in its reckless policies. For example, Director of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’68 frequently goes on record as saying that the he and his colleagues have admitted the best class they’ve ever seen. The fact that Fitzsimmons openly admits this shows that he and his staff do not realize how harmful their practices are to Harvard. Each class that is the best ever causes grades and honors statistics to inflate to new levels, and inflation of this sort is the biggest problem facing Harvard as it enters the 21st century. Isn’t that right?

Z. Samuel Podolsky ’04, a Crimson editor, is a classics concentrator in Currier House.