When “Rigor” Becomes a Weapon: The Ideological Attack on the 'Studies' Fields at the University of Texas at Austin
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
November 10, 2025
Christopher Schorr’s recent report, Are the “Studies” Worth Studying?, claims to measure academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. What it actually does is recycle a familiar political attack on ethnic and gender studies under the pretense of social science method. From its title forward, the report manufactures its conclusion first and hunts for data later.
Geez—beginning with a slur, “the Studies,” Schorr collapses a wide range of intellectually distinct departments into a single caricature. He then proceeds to compare them with STEM and social science programs using cherry-picked data drawn from a questionable time period that overlaps with the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a portrait of academic life so distorted that it tells us far more about the author’s ideology than about the university itself.
For the record, “the Studies” appear nowhere in scholarly classification, allowing Schorr to dismiss diverse intellectual traditions as a single ideological bloc. The centerpiece of the analysis is a crude equation of grade distributions with “rigor.” If a department awards more A’s, Schorr concludes, it must be less rigorous. That logic collapses under the weight of even introductory research-methods standards. Grades are not standardized across disciplines; they reflect different epistemologies, pedagogies, and assessment practices.
What Schorr calls evidence of “low rigor” is, in fact, a misunderstanding of how different disciplines assess learning. Departments such as Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies rely on research, writing, and critical engagement with lived experience—not multiple-choice exams or lab problems. To equate fewer B’s and C’s with higher standards is to misread diversity of method as deficiency.
Measuring a laboratory course by the same yardstick as an ethnographic field study makes about as much sense as evaluating engineers and poets with the same exam. It would be just as absurd as measuring aerospace engineering programs by how well they rate on cultural competence—or judging literature departments by their mastery of thermodynamics.
Rigor is not a matter of how many students get A’s. It is demonstrated through valid and reliable assessments of learning—clear rubrics, demanding capstones, peer review, and measurable intellectual growth. Instructors who grade on mastery rather than competition are not “inflating” grades; they are honoring learning as a developmental process rather than a ranking contest.
The report’s methods are as careless as its premises. It pools data from pandemic-era semesters (2020–2024), when universities across the country temporarily altered grading policies to accommodate extraordinary disruptions. It flattens UT Austin’s plus-minus grading system into whole letters, artificially raising GPAs. It treats small seminars with 10 students as equally representative as 900-seat lecture courses. And it controls for nothing: not student preparation, prior GPA, or instructor variation—variables every social-science graduate student learns to include before drawing conclusions.
When the statistics crumble, the ideology shows through. Schorr’s citations rely heavily on polemics, RateMyProfessors blurbs, and the so-called “grievance studies” hoax. He conflates community-engaged scholarship and decolonial inquiry with “activism,” ignoring half a century of peer-reviewed research demonstrating their rigor and social impact.
The report concludes with a call to abolish entire departments—an act it euphemistically calls “improving rigor.” In truth, it proposes an intellectual purge, one that would silence precisely the fields that interrogate race, gender, power, and the structures of exclusion in our society. This is not the defense of truth the author claims; it is a narrowing of truth to fit an ideology.
If Schorr truly cared about academic rigor, he would advocate for transparent rubrics, common assessment frameworks across institutions, and longitudinal studies that track actual learning gains. Instead, he offers a polemic that undermines the very academic freedom he pretends to defend.
The real crisis in higher education isn’t grade inflation. It’s the corrosion of public trust through weaponized statistics and bad-faith scholarship. Reports like this one sow suspicion of faculty, delegitimize entire fields of study, and mislead the public about what crucially important segments of the academy actually do, namely, teach students when and how to question power and to think critically about the world they are poised to shape.
Universities deserve honest inquiry, not political theater dressed up as "data." If we care about rigor, let’s start by demanding it from those who claim to measure it.
Reference
Schorr, C. (2025). Are the ‘Studies’ worth studying? A cross-department comparison of academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. America First Policy Institute. https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/are-the-studies-worth-studying-a-cross-department-comparison-of-academic-rigor-at-the-university-of-texas-at-austin
ARE THE 'STUDIES' WORTH STUDYING? A CROSS-DEPARTMENT COMPARISON OF ACADEMIC RIGOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Christopher Schorr, Ph.D. | May 8, 2025 | America First Policy Institute
INTRODUCTION
In competitive environments, a common dictum holds: “They can’t all be winners.” University grading seems to defy this rule. During the last three decades, grade point averages (GPA) rose 17% at four-year public universities and 16% at private non-profit universities (Nam, 2024). Grade inflation diminishes the value of grades as repositories of information pertaining to academic quality. This, in turn, harms universities’ pedagogical and professional missions. When excellent students are indistinguishable from merely competent students, student achievement wanes, and universities (e.g., graduate admissions officers) and prospective employers are forced to evaluate applicants by other means (Arum & Roksa, 2011; Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023).
Student migration into less rigorous courses and disciplines contributes to grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016). Several notoriously lax-grading disciplines, collectively known as “the Studies,” have well-earned reputations for prioritizing activism over scholarship (Bawer, 2023). As described in this report, the Studies’ strong ideological and activist commitments could contribute to lax grading by creating alternatives to traditional assessments of academic quality. Increased enrollment in the Studies would, therefore, tend to harm overall (university-wide) grading rigor (hereafter, “rigor”).
This report investigates this possibility at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), a large public university. It presents findings from an analysis of 10 semesters of grades obtained from 21 disciplines spanning three fields of study: the Studies, the social sciences, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It finds the Studies to be considerably less rigorous than comparison fields. When considered alongside longstanding concerns regarding the limited intellectual merits of these disciplines, these findings raise serious doubts as to the value of continuing to host these disciplines. This report concludes with several recommendations for improving rigor in higher education.
RIGOR AND GRADE INFLATION
What does an “A” grade signify in a university setting? How does it differ from a “B” or a “C,” for instance? Universities sometimes provide official answers to these questions; however, most students and faculty know grading rigor often differs by course, department, and field.
Academic rigor is closely related to grade inflation, the tendency for grades to increase over time. Grades have been likened to a currency in that, much as the value of the dollar depreciates overtime due to increases in the money supply, the value of a given grade (e.g., an “A”) and high GPAs depreciate overtime due to the proliferation of higher grades. The primary culprit for grade inflation appears to be increasingly lax grading in response to “consumer demand” from students and parents; however, changes in student quality and student self-selection into easier-grading courses are contributing factors as well (Rojstaczer, 2023; Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).
Rigor describes the setting and maintaining of high standards to preserve the value of grades against inflationary pressures.[1] The failure to maintain rigor undermines the usefulness of grades as signals of academic quality—i.e., subject matter mastery, diligence, and skill. The proliferation of “A” grades in undergraduate settings complicates efforts by employers and graduate admissions officers to separate the academic wheat from chaff, forcing them to rely on other metrics (Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023).
Failing to maintain rigor also reduces student learning by removing a key impetus for course mastery. As described in an internal Yale University memo, compromising rigor results in “students who do exceptional work [being] lumped together with those who have merely done good work, and in some cases with those who have done merely adequate work” (Mayhew, 1993). Students appear to be studying and learning less than in years past, yet grades continue to rise year-over-year (Babcock & Marks, 2010; Arum & Roksa, 2011). This paradox suggests the failure to maintain rigor has harmed student learning while also distorting the economy of academic grading.
Most research in this area addresses declining rigor over time (grade inflation); however, removing the time dimension can help to illuminate other important factors. For example, the natural sciences and math are typically more rigorous than the social sciences, which, in turn, are more rigorous than the humanities (Achen & Courant, 2009; Rojstaczer & Healy, 2010). Students appear to recognize this pattern insofar as self-selection into less rigorous disciplines is among the drivers of grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).
THE STUDIES
One field of study—the Studies—deserves special attention. The Studies are a collection of relatively new academic disciplines such as “Women and Gender Studies,” “African American Studies,” “Mexican-American / Latin(o/a/x) Studies,” and so on.[2] The Studies have been criticized for prioritizing political and social activism over rigorous scholarship (Ginsberg, 2025; Schalin 2025).
As discussed further below, this reputation makes the Studies a presumptive target for investigations of rigor and/or grade inflation. The Studies often fare poorly in cross-department comparisons. For example, “Afroamerican and African Studies” and “Women’s Studies” ranked 14th and 21st out of 25 departments respectively in terms of rigor at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007 (Achen & Courant, 2009). More recently, an internal Yale College report uncovered that “Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies” awarded “A” grades to 92% of students in introductory courses.[3]“African American Studies” (82.2% “A”), “Regional Studies” (82.7% “A”), “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration” (85.4% “A”), and “Education Studies” (85.8% “A”) followed closely behind (Fair, 2023).[4]
