Yale takes on Americans' dropping trust in higher education

The problems — and politics — of academia have long been a cultural lightning rod. The right tends to see universities as a bastion of progressive elites; the left sees right wing attacks on higher education, particularly under President Donald Trump, as part of an authoritarian power grab. Now, Yale University has entered the controversy with its own report, requested by university president Maurie McInnis, by its Committee on Trust in Higher Education.

The report says that nationally, the share of Americans expressing "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education dropped from 57% 10 years ago to just 36% in 2024, and discusses the causes of this drop in trust and ways to fix it. Some of the problems include lack of transparency in college admissions and uncertainty about the purpose and value of a college degree. But the report also singles out two areas with a lot of culture war relevance: free speech and intellectual pluralism.

The report notes that in a 2025 campus survey, nearly a third of Yale undergraduates — particularly but not only conservatives — said they did not feel free to express their political beliefs at school, compared with just 17% 10 years earlier. Some free expression issues have to do with recent pressures from the Trump administration: international students expressed fear of being deported. But far more common are tensions over the progressive values that are dominant on campus, particularly ones related to gender, sexuality and identity. The subject of Halloween still elicits great anxiety 10 years after a campus firestorm over a dorm adviser's email in defense of costumes that might be deemed culturally insensitive (such as a white student dressing as Mulan). Protests caused the adviser to resign and also leave her faculty post.

Political and intellectual diversity is another lightning rod. Among college faculty nationwide, the report notes, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans about 10 to 1; but at Yale, according to a 2025 estimate, the Democrat-to-Republican ratio in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School and the School of Management is a whopping 36 to 1. The report notes that many conservative students feel their views are not welcome in the classroom and that many alumni worry that "the campus [is] trending toward intellectual and ideological conformity."

Yet some members of the Yale community, the report notes, worry that "intellectual diversity" can become an excuse for political pressures to give more space to right wing opinions — which, these days, can often drift into authoritarianism and conspiracy theories. There may be disagreement about the scope of desirable pluralism. But the report also says that on one point, the consensus is universal: "Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship."

The document flags another problem: Yale's 2016 mission statement that included such noble-sounding but vague goals as "improving the world" and promoting a "diverse" community. The report recommends a simple and clear statement: "Yale University's mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching."

Some may see the Yale report as conceding too much to the right and to the Trump administration; some may blame the loss of trust in academia on far-right propaganda. But plenty of critics within universities, including centrists, liberals and progressives, have long warned about the drift away from the university's intellectual mission — and toward groupthink and conformity. Confronting those problems doesn't give ammunition to the right; instead, it can make the universities stronger in pushing back against right wing attacks.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.