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The full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) gestures towards "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable. Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs. administration thing, which makes sense to me.

When we are put into a catch-22 situation, we should not expect sympathy from the ones who created the catch-22 situation.

Especially when “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." – Upton Sinclair

> larger-than-normal percent

it seems to me this is a ratcheting effect. If a larger than average is discouraged, even implicitly by being called to a meeting, people will target under the average. Repeat this and you'll quickly find the average plummeting