The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education issued a report this month that has been widely adored. It’s been called “a landmark report” and praised across the establishment media, from Fortune (“Teacher, blame thyself: Yale report savages Ivy League schools for destroying American trust in higher education”) to The Wall Street Journal (“Why Everyone Hates the Ivy League”) and The New York Times (“Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems”). It seems the only thing people enjoy more than hating colleges is watching academia hate itself.
The Yale committee was charged with identifying why public trust in higher education has declined precipitously over the past decade. The decline is real: Surveys show a sharp drop in public confidence in higher education (primarily among conservatives), from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023, albeit with a significant uptick from 2024 to 2025.
But the causes identified by the Yale report—cost, admissions policies, free speech, political diversity and grade inflation—are questionable at best. The report offers zero empirical evidence to connect any particular issues to “trust,” and few logical arguments. Instead, the report is a compendium of things the committee doesn’t like about Yale with their suggestions for reforms—some good, some lousy, but none of them addressing the actual causes of declining trust.
Were there any dramatic changes in higher education in the late 2010s and early 2020s that would rationally explain this loss of faith? If you look at tuition rates, grade inflation, admissions policies, freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity—all of the things identified by this report as the cause of declining trust—there is no logical connection between anything happening on campus and a massive loss of faith in higher education.
The Yale committee refuses to come out and speak the truth: The decline in trust of higher education is primarily caused by conservatives being duped by right-wing con artists in a partisan attack on liberal institutions deemed to be the “enemy of the people.” Too many people, especially conservatives, trust the right-wing politicians, activists and commentators who have falsely told them over and over that colleges are cesspools of left-wing indoctrination suppressing conservative ideas. The far right always hated colleges, but its impact was muted by the mainstream media and moderate Republicans who recognized the value of higher education. With the rise of Trump, conservative politics became an echo chamber of right-wing ideologues, and faith in colleges was one of the casualties.
There are real problems with free speech and viewpoint diversity on campuses, among many other needed reforms. But the problems colleges face and the solutions to them, are never revealed by a public survey about “trust.”
The entire premise behind this report is wrong. Colleges should not make “reforms” based on public opinion. Trust is not an academic value.
Academia should fundamentally oppose the concept of trust. We don’t trust scholars; we scrutinize them. We don’t trust professors; we verify or refute them. We don’t trust academics; we demand evidence and proof. We require footnotes and arguments, not credentials. We don’t trust people who put “Ph.D.” after their names on book covers; we mock them for suggesting that earning an advanced degree should cause someone to trust whatever they say.
According to the Yale report, “public trust is particularly important for higher education to succeed.” No, it’s not. You can value something without trusting it. I value scholarship and teaching and arguments that I don’t agree with and certainly do not trust. If people refuse to blindly trust higher education, that would be something to celebrate. Everything we should value in higher education—academic freedom, free speech, dissent, viewpoint diversity—depends upon destroying this facile concept of trust. Debate and disagreement are valuable precisely because they undermine a false sense of trust. The greatest lesson colleges can teach to their students and the public is the importance of distrust.
So any report devoted to trust in academia is constructed on a flawed foundation.
The causes claimed in the report for declining trust appear to be guesses by the committee with little basis in evidence. The rising cost of higher education (mostly driven by cuts in government funding) is a real source of displeasure with colleges, but as the report points out, Yale has already made tuition free for students from families earning less than $200,000 a year, making Yale’s financial aid far more equitable now than at any other period in its history. Certainly many conservatives hated affirmative action, but that’s already been banned. And it’s hard to find any evidence of a public outcry to stop grade inflation at elite colleges.
A huge decline in public trust toward higher education occurred from 2015 to 2023, but there is little evidence of any dramatic changes in political diversity or campus free speech during this brief time. By contrast, a big increase in public trust happened in 2025—the worst year for campus free speech in recorded history.
We might like to imagine that the public strongly supports free speech on campus, trusting colleges when they protect free expression and distrusting them when they censor. Most of the evidence indicates the opposite is true.
The committee’s analysis of free speech is particularly troubling because it relies on the 2015 Christakis Halloween story: “Few episodes have done more to raise public questions about Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression and open, reasoned debate.” That’s certainly true—but do the facts justify this bizarre obsession with this case of Yale students in 2015 getting into a public argument with Professor Nicholas Christakis over his wife’s attack on an administrator’s email urging students not to wear racist Halloween costumes?
In 2025, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recounted the incident as “the moment I realized something had gone terribly, maybe irreversibly, wrong in higher ed.” Stephens wondered about the students, “Why weren’t they immediately suspended or expelled?” Why weren’t misguided students expelled for talking to a professor in a public argument? Probably because it’s not a violation of any campus rule and calling for their expulsion is a demand for censorship.
The committee is strangely silent about real attacks on campus speech at Yale. Yale fired a psychiatry professor in 2021 for denouncing Donald Trump, and FIRE denounced then-president Peter Salovey for threatening to expel students over their speech in 2023. But the only problem with free speech at Yale identified by the committee is the Christakis case, where no one was fired, punished or even investigated. Free speech is ignored when the leftists are being silenced. Trust only matters to the committee when the feelings of conservatives are hurt.
I have no problem with anyone advocating reforms for higher education. But don’t pretend that your personal complaints about test scores and grade inflation are saving colleges from a crisis of public trust. Make logical arguments for these reforms on their own merits, not speculation about what might change survey responses on public confidence.
The “reforms” advocated by the committee are often strange. Why would a minimum SAT score for applicants somehow increase “trust” in Yale? Why would families struggling to pay higher tuition at public colleges due to government budget cuts trust higher education more if Yale gives free tuition to more millionaires? Why would any “reform” move the needle on a sudden shift in declining trust driven by a partisan attack on higher education?
It’s possible that colleges could make conservatives trust them more by bowing down to right-wing demands: Silencing the free speech of leftists, preferential hiring for conservatives, banning DEI and gender studies, prohibiting pronouns, suppressing protests, discriminating against trans people, and waving the American flag.
But you can’t “reform” your way out of a problem created by propaganda unless you’re willing to destroy academic freedom in the process.
The desire to be trusted by the public should never be the motive for any reforms in higher education. We should improve colleges even if it’s not politically popular. And reforms that many people might support—more professors of creationism and astrology—should be rejected as antithetical to academic standards.
We should support free speech on campus not because it builds confidence in higher education (it often doesn’t), but because it’s the right thing to do.
The failure to follow moral principles—rather than supporting whatever a poll says will build trust—is a core problem with this report. Of course, since no one actually knows what policies will build trust, the Yale committee can spout whatever reforms they personally prefer and pretend that public “trust” hangs in the balance.
Instead of using public opinion as an excuse to discuss reform, we need to trust ourselves to identify problems and seek to solve them. And that means we need to exercise our powers of skepticism and distrust. We need to distrust both the public opinion of “trust” surveys and the elite opinions celebrating an academic committee’s questionable findings. We need to stop relying on trust and instead distrust the facile assumptions, misguided advice and flawed logic of one committee at one college.
Fools imagine that trust in higher education can be rebuilt by bowing down to right-wing demands, firing leftists, suppressing free speech and installing conservatives into faculty and administrative positions based on their politics rather than merit. Obedience to repression will only turn colleges into political pawns of the far right and undermine what little support they have left.
Universities can build support for academia by rejecting trust and embracing its opposite: a culture of debate, verification, dissent, dispute and distrust.
John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at collegefreedom@yahoo.com, and letters to the editor can be sent to letters@insidehighered.com.
