Some historic turning points live long in the collective memory, says Justin Webb in The Times, like “Sarajevo and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand”. Others are only noticed later, and even then not much. The Dayton Peace Accords, for example, are “hardly the stuff of modern day wonder”, but it seems obvious with almost 30 years’ hindsight that they mark the “high point of the unipolar world”, when US envoy Richard Holbrooke imposed “through force of will and force of arms” an end to the Bosnian civil war. Since 1998, “it has all been downhill for the untrammelled use of American might”.

Last Christmas, hidden amid the re-election of Donald Trump, came another quiet turning point. The renowned psychologist Steven Pinker resigned as honorary president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation – the equivalent of Britain’s National Secular Society – after supporting the organisation for 20 years. It had, he said, lost its way. It was “no longer a defender of freedom from religion” but had become “the imposer of a new religion”, complete with dogma, blasphemy and heretics, and had “turned its back on reason”. He was referring to a row about trans rights, specifically the rights of those who believe “biological sex is real and immutable”. His departure must have seemed to many a “necessary piece of historical progress”. But it seems increasingly obvious they have “misread the times”. A recent study suggests a majority of American students are “faking their wokeness” – when asked anonymously if they ever feigned progressive views to get along socially or professionally, 88% of those surveyed said yes. Trump promised to take on the woke takeover of universities. As unlikely as it once seemed, his intervention may be welcome.

The new romcom Materialists, in which the elite Manhattan matchmaker Lucy finds herself in a love triangle between a rich and handsome investor and her charismatic ex-boyfriend who can barely afford the rent on his shared flat, paints marriage as a “purely financial endeavour”, says Meg Walters in The Guardian. In Lucy’s world, any notions of love are “deemed to be irrelevant” – “eerily similar” to the marriage market of Jane Austen’s day, when coupling up was a decision made by practicality rather than passion. The appeal of Austen’s novels, though, was that the heroines “clung to the fantasy of a love match”, despite the constraints of their time. Today, we’re seeing the reverse: “an era of young women who have given up on love”.

Heroines now “proudly proclaim their desire for a practical match”. At the beginning of Materialists, Lucy declares: “I will die alone or marry a rich man.” In Anora, which won best picture at this year’s Oscars, the hero is a sex worker who meets and marries the filthy rich son of a Russian oligarch as a “way out of poverty”. Young women are reappraising female characters who were once judged for their practical approach to love. Meredith Blake, the gold-digging villain of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, is now seen by many on TikTok as an “icon” who “wouldn’t settle”. When Greta Gerwig released her 2019 adaptation of Little Women, there was a new “idolisation” of the financially minded Amy March, who says: “Don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is.” It seems our straitened economic times have taken us right back to the philosophy that “romance is merely a business deal”.

Last year, says Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, Rakesh Khurana, the then dean of Harvard University, laughed when he announced the average GPA score of the graduating class – 3.8 out of 4. Other professors could scarcely stifle their sniggers, not only because of the “ludicrously high” figure, but because they knew “just how little students were doing” to achieve it. Because professors at Harvard today are encouraged to pander to students’ fragile “emotional wellbeing”, almost everyone gets an A for pretty much everything. When students are awarded a rare B+ they simply sob during their lecturer’s office hours, then skip out with an A-. One prominent psychologist says that despite student performance in one of his exams declining by 10 percentage points over the past two decades, he finds he’s giving out more A grades than ever.

When academics were first told to go easy on their students, some resisted – the aforementioned psychologist used to hand out an A or A- to only a quarter of his pupils. So students simply “stopped signing up” to his classes. Now, to lure them back, he hands top marks to around two thirds of attendees. In 2011, 60% of all grades at Harvard were in the A range – up from 33% in 1985. By the 2020-21 academic year, when Covid lockdowns meant students were “more anxious than ever”, it had jumped to 79%. Some still achieve them for genuinely excellent work, of course, but more and more get top marks for some other reason – they’re from a disadvantaged background and demonstrated improvement, say, or a mental health crisis “derailed” their progress. Perhaps none of this matters, but historically, “as goes Harvard, so goes the rest of the sector”. Pretty soon, American college grades will mean nothing at all.