Maybe a Chinese national suggested it. The University of Michigan is chock-full of ‘em, after all. Indeed, these dutiful commie stooges sometimes try to sneak bioweapons into town.

But, hey, those overseas tuition dollars, amirite? Cha-ching.

Or maybe this plot to embarrass one of America’s finest public universities was homegrown. Occam’s Razor suggests that it was probably one of the usual suspects — a Marxist sociology professor, for example, or one of those 163 taxpayer-funded DEI enforcers on the university’s payroll.

But regardless of whose bright idea it was to unburden incoming freshmen from having letter grades on their transcripts during their first semester at Michigan, it’d be hard to come up with a suggestion whose implications were more grim or ruinous — both for America’s youth and for the, ahem, Leaders and Best.

Here’s how the university’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts explains it: “Beginning in fall 2027, the College will designate all LSA first-year students’ first-semester grades as pass (P) or no credit (NC) on their transcripts. While LSA students will still receive grades and instructor feedback in every course as they always have, final grades will not be recorded on their external transcripts and will not be reflected in their GPAs.”

Why on earth would a university do this — especially an elite university whose admissions standards alone should ensure that incoming students are capable of doing the work? As the university explains it: “Helping all students establish early momentum has been recognized as the most important element in U-M’s campus-wide Student Success Initiative. We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

You know what helps establish “early momentum” among young adults? Early dedication to the task at hand, and early realization that this is what it’s like in the real world, and early understanding that you alone are accountable for your success or failure. It’s called autonomy. It’s called growing up. And it used to be what college was all about.

As for the “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” it seems to me that coddling young people will only perpetuate their snowflakiness. While they’re at it, maybe the university can coddle these poor things with Play-Doh and coloring books. Oh, wait.

As I see it, if Jack Lucas can summon up the stones to jump on a Japanese grenade just five days after turning 17, well, maybe incoming freshmen can conjure the courage to receive letter grades during their first semester at Michigan.

“We’ve gotten to the point,” says psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, “where normal stress is being treated like a mental health problem. Getting a bad grade is disappointing. It can be embarrassing. It can make you anxious. But that doesn’t make it psychologically harmful.”

Alpert adds, “College should prepare students for adulthood. Your boss isn’t going to hide a bad performance review because it might make you anxious. Life doesn’t come with grade-covering. At some point, young people have to learn that feeling bad is not the same thing as being harmed.”

Exactly so.

This is what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were warning us about in The Coddling of the American Mind. Their truth-telling book, whose subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” picks up where professor Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind left off back in 1987, suggesting that three really bad ideas have become increasingly woven into the fabric of American childhood and American education:

• What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
  
• Always trust your feelings
  
• Life is a battle between good people and evil people

As Lukianoff and Haidt sum up their chapter on “The Bureaucracy of Safetyism,” schools that coddle aren’t helping our kids grow up — on the contrary, they’re retarding them: “Efforts to protect students by creating bureaucratic means of resolving problems and conflicts can have the unintended consequence of fostering moral dependence, which may reduce students’ ability to resolve conflicts independently both during and after college.”

Again, exactly so. Let’s do away with the participation trophies and — for all that money we’re spending at Michigan and elsewhere — demand better for our children. The future of America depends on it.