I was planning to congratulate UNC-Chapel Hill on taking a genuine step toward reducing or nullifying grade inflation. The school was about to institute—at long last—what is called contextual grading. That is, a student’s transcripts will have both the grade he or she received in a course and the average grade for that course.

The point is that if the average grade is an A, then the individual’s A does not have the value it would have if the average were B or (heavens forfend!) a C. Thus, the new transcript strikes a blow against inflation.

But students have protested, glitches have occurred, and the university has postponed the innovation for at least a semester.

Come on now. This plan has been under study since 2009, it went through a faculty approval process led by sociology professor Andrew Perrin, and now it is postponed.

We don’t really know why. The Daily Tar Heel suggests a variety of reasons. If the response is to students’ protests, that’s a terrible thing (more about catering to students in another post); if it is, rather, due to the technical problems of implementing the plan, where has the registrar been all these months and years? And if, as the registrar seems to imply, the faculty is somehow at fault, then we really do have to wonder how a university can get anything done.