a 2013 article about Harvey Mansfield's war on grade inflation. What's funny is that Harvey Mansfield has been at war against grade inflation for at least 18 years, going back to his anti-Affirmative-Action debate (somehow, affirmative action caused grade inflation among the majority-white population of Harvard, according to Mansfield).
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~lombardi/edudocs/mansfield_grade...
Back in the '90s, the going theory was that _Vietnam War_ created grade inflation, as schools gave out higher grades to help students get draft deferments. Of course, that was before GWBush taught us that you can draft-dodge just fine with C grades.
I suffered a serious bias of the kind: "Well, this is Harvard, let's try a bit more to make sense out of it, maybe it's you that dont understand"