Reform of the nation’s higher-education institutions – like reform of any undertaking or organization – comes in various shapes and sizes.
Colleges and universities can handle through more effective oversight a professor or an administrator who deviates from the institution’s larger educational mission. Mounting departures from the institution’s larger mission require more extensive reform. And colleges and universities that lose sight of their larger mission, forgetting its key educational components or outright supplanting educational goals with political ones, call for comprehensive reform.
Months of campus protests – including harassment, intimidation, and unlawful encampments – following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter of and kidnapping of Israelis, mainly civilians, shocked many observers off campus. Few on campuses drew the reasonable conclusion that colleges and universities that educate students who are disposed to side with the enthusiastic, premeditated perpetration of mass atrocities demand far-reaching reform.
Most of the nation’s top colleges and universities know that they should affirm that robust exchange of opinion is essential to the acquisition of knowledge. Not many, though, operate their education programs in accordance with the conviction that views dissenting from campus orthodoxy require assiduous protection and often make an indispensable contribution to the pursuit of truth.
Most of the nation’s top colleges and universities know that they should state the importance of abiding by the principles of due process in adjudicating charges against students, faculty, and administration. Yet they frequently lack a sure grasp of the process that is due the aggrieved and the accused.
Most of the nation’s top colleges and universities know that they should tout their curricula as serving students’ interests. However, they tend to be satisfied with their offerings and requirements despite generally failing to provide a coherent introduction to American political ideas and institutions, the Western tradition, and other civilizations.
Our colleges and universities’ obliviousness to their own serious shortcomings is a measure of how badly they have lost their way.
For at least 75 years, critics, mainly conservatives, have been taking notice of American higher education’s illiberal practices in the name of liberalism. In 1951 in “God and Man at Yale,” William F. Buckley Jr. exposed Yale’s social-sciences faculty’s collectivist slant and its humanities faculty’s atheistic dogmas. By the 1990s, political correctness had struck campuses with a vengeance, eroding free speech, truncating due process especially for those accused of sexual misconduct, politicizing the humanities and social sciences, and laying the foundations for the woke progressivism that deforms higher education today. Not all or even most professors took an active role in coopting higher education, but the vast majority played along or ignored the rot.
According to Gallup, public confidence in higher education has been falling since 2015, when 57% of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in U.S. higher education and only 10% had very little or no confidence. By 2024, those who had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education had dropped to 36% with a stunning 32% expressing little or no confidence. Views rebounded somewhat in 2025 with 42% saying they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in U.S. higher education and 23% little or none.
The mid-April release of the “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education” suggests that at long last colleges and universities are beginning to realize the scope of their institutions’ disrepair. The Yale committee is composed of 10 faculty members drawn from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as well as Yale’s schools of the environment, law, medicine, and public health. The committee’s report sends an encouraging message that the adults on campus wish to reassert their authority and realign higher education with liberal education’s larger mission. The report also provides sobering evidence that the full magnitude of campus disrepair eludes those in charge of higher education in America.
Addressed to Yale President Maurie McInnis, the committee’s April 10 cover letter states, “In April 2025, you asked our committee to examine the problem of declining trust in higher education” and “emphasized the need to engage a variety of perspectives, both within the university and beyond.” The committee members welcomed the opportunity “to take the long view.” They stressed that “the problem of declining trust did not emerge out of nowhere over the past few months or years.” They agreed that “short-term solutions” will not suffice. They embraced President McInnis’ “call to think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.” They read widely; conducted extensive interviews with a broad array of Yale community members and with journalists, activists, politicians, and others outside Yale; and examined other universities. And they maintained that they confronted “some of higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots.”
While the committee’s report goes well beyond what most administrators and professors have acknowledged about higher education’s poor performance, it falls well short of telling the whole truth about colleges’ and universities’ earned distrust and facing up to higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots. The committee would have gotten off to a better start if it had considered why it has taken colleges and universities decades to notice their decline.
The report “identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust”: soaring costs, inequities in admissions, and the character of campus intellectual life.
The first two factors affect liberal education indirectly. Notwithstanding generous financial aid at the nation’s most selective and wealthiest universities, a yearly price tag of nearly $100,000 for tuition, room, and board may put many well-regarded institutions out of reach for some deserving students. And preferences in admissions based on race, on athletics and other non-academic talents, and on parentage for children of alumni, donors, faculty, and staff can impair the university’s academic mission.
The third factor, the character of campus intellectual life, goes directly to the aims, structure and content, and spirit of liberal education. The Yale report focused on free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. All in all, it found “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education.” That is alarming since such knowledge should constitute a prerequisite for running, and teaching at, colleges and universities.
The committee contends that Yale has mostly adhered to the high-minded principles of free speech set forth in its own 1974 Woodward Report. At the same time, the committee acknowledges that “the campus has not been immune from pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming that have affected the rest of higher education and, indeed, the rest of American society.” The committee mentions the shadow cast over Yale by the notorious 2015 brouhaha over Halloween costumes. Students reacted furiously to the suggestion by a top administrator at a Yale residential college that students and not the university should take responsibility for student Halloween parties and for responding to costumes some might deem inappropriate. Student outrage over the university’s alleged insensitivity prompted drastic university overreaction. To show that Yale’s heart was in the right place, then-Yale President Peter Salovey allocated tens of millions of additional dollars to promote inclusivity and racial diversity on campus.
The report equivocates on the issue of intellectual conformity. It notes that Democrats wildly outnumber Republicans among the faculty and that all agree that echo chambers are anathema to education. It adds, though, “No subject we took up was more contested.” That should not have surprised the committee or raised doubts that colleges and universities skew decidedly to the left since the dominant progressive majority, as dominant majorities are wont to do, tends to see its views not as partisan but as necessary and sufficient expressions of the truth.
The committee’s 20 recommendations are sensible, and their adoption would contribute to restoring trust in Yale and in higher education. Those that go directly to educational mission include redoubling the commitment to free speech, enhancing debate by ensuring representation of both sides, promoting open discussion in classes, and establishing “a civic education initiative that would reach every first-year undergraduate student on a regular basis.”
But the report leaves several hard questions unanswered.
For example, what are the grounds for believing that university administrators and faculty, who have presided over the decline in trust of higher education, are willing and able to restore it? After decades of purging the academic ranks of scholars devoted to studying politics from a historical and philosophical perspective, where will Yale and other colleges and universities find professors capable of teaching civic education? Why should civic education as the report defines it – American government, quantitative reasoning about politics, and emerging scientific and technological challenges – exhaust the common knowledge acquired by students? Shouldn’t Yale also introduce all undergraduates to the civilization – its history, literature, moral principles, economic arrangements, philosophical schools, and religious teachings – in which Yale is ensconced? And to the vital elements of other civilizations?
Lasting reform at Yale depends on grasping the magnitude of the challenge that higher education in America confronts.
