Today's Poll Question: Should Grades Still Matter?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Get ready to vote on today's daily poll question at smerconish.com.

**TC** (0:05)
But first, Michael explains it for you right here.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast from SiriusXM for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (0:15)
Hello, hello, hi gang. Here is your poll question for today, Friday the 14th of August, 2026 Should grades still matter? Should grades still matter? I made reference on radio the other day to the college tour for one of our kids that involved a visit to Providence, Rhode Island and Brown University. Actually, there's a footnote to the story that I'm not going to take the time to tell, although it's pretty damn interesting. On that trip, I remember spending time and eating lunch with the honorable Buddy Cianci.
Yeah, he was my sherpa while, you know, son one or two or three was getting the Brown Tour and we went to lunch in like the Providence little Italy and everybody.

**TC** (1:06)
You probably ate better than you've ever eaten.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:08)
Everybody's like, hello, Mayor. And he was no longer mayor and he'd gone away.

**TC** (1:13)
That's okay.

**TC** (1:14)
That's only better.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:16)
It was really extraordinary.

**TC** (1:18)
He listened to you while he was, quote, unquote, away.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:21)
Old school. He was really something.

**TC** (1:23)
He was really something. It's true.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:24)
He I mean, to TC's point, he said that I helped him get through his time because he was able to listen. That would have been on AM radio.
And he was in South Jersey. I guess he was in Fort Dix. Maybe he was in Fort Dix.

**TC** (1:39)
No, no.

**TC** (1:39)
But he's gone now. We just say away.

**TC** (1:42)
Right.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:42)
But he's but he's gone. He is gone. Anyway, the thing about Brown is this. And TC went to Harvard, as she likes to tell us so often.

**TC** (1:51)
That is not true.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:52)
But maybe you can attest to this. Brown has a reputation for being the most freewheeling of the Ivies.

**TC** (1:58)
So when we went to tour Brown, I just my distinct recollection is that they showed us this was way before sort of stalls for all and everything. They had, you know, gender neutral bathrooms. They didn't call it that. They just called Coed bathrooms. They had Coed bathrooms. And my mother was like, and we're done here.

**Michael Smerconish** (2:16)
Well, I pulled like the history.
1984, students famously voted in a campus referendum asking health services to stock suicide pills for use in the event of a nuclear war, a symbolic Cold War protest that made national news. They attempted citizen arrests of CIA recruiters in the 80s, drove apartheid divestment campaigns, and in 2001 seized nearly an entire press run of the Brown Daily Herald for running David Horowitz's anti-reparations ad.

**TC** (2:49)
Wow, coed bathrooms are nothing.

**Michael Smerconish** (2:51)
In 2013, students shouted down NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly until his lecture was canceled, an episode still cited in campus free speech debates. More recently, they drew attention when its corporation agreed to formally consider divestment from companies tied to Israel. Something more pedestrian.
On the cultural side, they have had traditions like the naked doughnut run. The naked doughnut. Where does one put the doughnut? I'm afraid. Is it like a ring toss thing?
And the now defunct sex power god dance, all fueling its image as the ivy where anything goes. But if you pull the sort of liberal traditions from Brown, the cornerstone is the open curriculum. And the open curriculum was adopted in 1969 after a student-driven reform effort led by Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell.
Brown abolished all distribution requirements and general education mandates. Students build their own course of study. They can take any class, pass, fail, satisfactory, no credit.
And failing grades never appear on transcripts. It remains the purest expression of liberal learning philosophy in the Ivy League and is central to Brown's identity. And I said, or used to say, ridiculous, until that college campus tour when... I can remember sitting in the basement of a particular building and listening to an undergrad explaining the Brown philosophy and how the curriculum works. And it made me think of how I would have changed my approach to undergraduate work if I had had that freedom. I would have explored, I would have been more broad-based. Instead, I graduated and I had a wonderful education and you know I love Lehigh. So this is not a criticism of Lehigh because Lehigh is typical, but in my case, I was a double major and I graduated with a very heavy concentration in government and journalism. Then, because I had a fondness for a particular professor, I took a lot of courses in urban studies and very little else. Very little else. It has served me well, no complaint. But this is what I've been thinking about since reading this story from the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, where now, beginning in the fall of 27, not this fall, not two weeks from now, but they're going to assign pass no credit grades rather than traditional letter grades during the first semester for all incoming students. There's still going to be a grade because they need to have a grade for students and for those who are on scholarship and so forth. So you'll still receive a grade and instructor feedback in all first semester courses, but final letter grades won't be recorded on their external transcript. And why are they doing this? Because they want to give freshmen an opportunity to settle in. This is largely driven by mental health considerations. And all of that and more, which I'll tell you in a moment, is why I'm asking today, should grades still matter? Should grades still matter?