The arrival of the 57-page Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education has attracted far more interest than the pronouncements of most faculty committees. That is partly due to the word “trust” in the title. Here is an Ivy League university daring to admit what polls, common sense, and we critics have been saying for a long time: Yale, along with most of American higher education, has suffered a steep decline in public trust.

What exactly does that mean? Polls typically blur the picture by asking, as did Gallup recently, “How important is a college education today — very important, fairly important or not too important?” or—also Gallup—”Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in each one — a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?”

Such questions produce graphs that show a steady erosion over the last decade in that elusive phenomenon of “trust.” And they allow analysts to tease out how much greater the decline has been among conservatives than among liberals, among men than among women, among “people of color” than among whites, and so on. But the most important point is that “trust” has fallen precipitously in every category.

Its “perceived value” for U.S. adults has gone from 70 percent of us regarding college education as “very important” in 2013 to 35 percent of us saying so in 2015. The value of seemingly timeless, institutional goods simply doesn’t behave that way—losing in a mere 12 years the high regard of half the population that used to see them as paramount.

The decline hasn’t gone unnoticed or unexplained. In fact, we have explanations that fit every intellectual budget. My own are that (1) the public awakened to the reality that the typical college degree no longer serves as a reasonably good guarantee of a white collar job; (2) the cost of the college degree—tuition room and board and other fees—has exploded; (3) the “college experience” has decayed into a lot of unpleasantness and very little joy; (4) the quality of the curriculum has thinned; (5) political indoctrination, ideological bullying, and canceling are rampant; and (6) the relations between men and women are more fraught. (Read “An Ivy League President Breaks Ranks.”)

The great decline in “trust” occurred before artificial intelligence entered the picture, but it will surely shave off a few more percentage points as 17-year-olds realize that many of the jobs they might once have aspired to will simply disappear by the time they graduate.

I could list many more factors, and I read leftist analyses that explain the decline differently. Perhaps “late capitalism” has found it more convenient to mass produce uncritical consumers by keeping them away from colleges that would teach them to see through the deceptions of the rich and powerful. Or perhaps the students have been demoralized by the failure of America to confront the reality of global warming. When people say things like this, I take it that they are admitting that American higher education has transformed itself into a factory of political indoctrination. And in that sense, I agree.

But what do the Yale professors say?

They start by saying “he issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed.” They focus on Yale, but expect their observations “may prove useful to others in higher education.”

I commend the report, first of all, for its breadth. The 10-member committee dealt with tuition, admission, political bias, technology, grade inflation, and more. It examined views from outside the university and “complementary issues of trust within the university.”

The committee also took the now bold step of declaring that “[u]niversities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge.” That’s the opening sentence, and it is worth pondering. I have probably reviewed hundreds of college mission statements in the last several decades and watched in sadness as more and more often they drifted into declarations of purpose far from preserving, creating, and sharing knowledge.

The rising tide of alternative purposes began with the shift in the late 1980s into colleges that saw promoting “diversity” as a core purpose. But soon other attractive bobbles began to find their place in the good intentions of the steward of the institutions. We became fixated on creating “global awareness” or “global citizens.” We found dozens of ways to say that our college was dedicated to transforming American society for the better. The once-popular “College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment” subordinated everything else to the need to fight climate change. Put a little time into examining how colleges and universities have promoted themselves in the last several decades, and you find precious little about “preserving, creating, and sharing knowledge.” And you will find an abundance of arrows pointing in other directions.

So the Yale committee begins its report with a strikingly bold declaration.

Its next step is to cut through the myriad factors behind the rise of distrust. I listed six. The committee compresses them to three: “soaring price,” the “admissions system,” and speech. I can work with that. These are categories that can encompass most, if not all, that has gone wrong.

It isn’t my purpose to provide a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the whole report. Some of the report is about methods and context, which gets us a little closer to the “wide gap between what the public wants from institutions of higher education and what those institutions appear to deliver.” I notice a little hedging in that sentence. The real fap is between what universities should be and what they are, but the gap between what the “public wants” and “what appears” lowers the stakes. The committee invokes “academic freedom,” naturally enough, but in a manner that emphasizes the history of threats to such freedom from outside the university and silently passes over the reckless misuse of the doctrine on campus. And the committee acknowledges that the “Cold War university” model made the university dependent on federal funding. So much for “context.”

The report’s section on “cost” is its most Yale-specific section. It allows “public expectation and
institutional practice” to be widely divergent. The most telling paragraph here comes last, where the committee acknowledges that the extravagant prices are driven by the pursuit of diversity, aka “a wide array of students.”

That brings the committee to “undergraduate admissions,” which is where the authors flinch. A few years ago, Dionne Pierre and I wrote a 250-page study for the National Association of Scholars, Neo-Segregation at Yale, which examined the origins and dire consequences of Yale’s decisions in the 1960s to veer away from mostly meritocratic admissions to race-based social engineering. The committee can’t help but look at that era as well, but it tiptoes through it. Yale’s president at the time, Kingman Brewster, wrote that Yale’s admissions should prioritize seeking “future leaders,” which meant “applicants whose capacities would let them benefit most from Yale’s resources.” This meant a “holistic admissions process.”

Well, ok. And it meant an astonishing amount of misjudgment on the part of Yale’s admissions staff on who these “future leaders” might be. The great majority of the admitted students failed out or left demoralized. The flood of disappointed future leaders was stemmed only when Yale agreed to provide them with black studies and other workarounds that began the spiral of grade inflation and curricular dilution.

The committee understandably avoids the topic—and ignores Pierre’s and my study—and ends up with the anodyne observation that “Constructing a class will always involve judgment.” Yes, and decades of bad judgment will always produce a university that loses the public trust and is confounded about how to get it back without giving up its idols.

The next section of the report deals with “Free Speech and Self-Censorship.” Most readers will come to it with the 2015 Nicholas Halloween costume affair and the video of the mobbing of Professor Christakis in mind. They will find only a brief mention of the former: “The very word ‘Halloween’ remains charged around campus.” But the section as a whole acknowledges in general that self-censorship is a problem at Yale, though one that the university is seeking “to address.”

Perhaps this is as much confession as a faculty committee can be expected to make in a public document. One can read between the lines and see that the faculty members who drafted it know a lot more than they dare say. “Self-censorship” goes all the way up the line. I’ll pass over the remaining sections circumspectly and turn to the 20 recommendations in which the committee returns to the robust voice of the opening declarations. Yale should “take responsibility,” “focus on the mission,” “protect free speech,” “make higher education affordable,” “reform undergraduate admissions,” “open minds,” “deliver educational value,” “resist self-censorship,” “grade like we mean it,” and “lead by example,” among other things. Each of these is accompanied by some thunderclaps of emphatic declaration. 

Well, what was I expecting? Yale has done a better job than any of the other elite universities in bearing its shame. But as I carry my bucket full of trust through academe, looking for the institutions most deserving of a generous share, I’m afraid Yale has so far earned only a few pennies’ worth. 

I’m grading like I mean it. You should try a little harder to resist self-censorship.

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