In case anyone missed it, higher education in America is in crisis. In 2010, according to Gallup, 75 percent of Americans believed college was “very important.” That number tumbled to 35 percent by last September. By 2024, just 36 percent of Americans reported a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in our academic institutions.
Meanwhile, the percentage of college students who reject freedom of speech has risen, with the percentage who believe using violence against “hate speech” is an acceptable solution approaching 40 percent. These sentiments exploded after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, when campus radicals indulged in violent protests, often with impunity. Congressional hearings exposed an institutional culture so scandalously tone-deaf that multiple Ivy League presidents were forced to resign in disgrace. Enrollments and donations took a serious hit. In the first year after President Trump’s return to office, his administration issued adverse findings and imposed hefty sanctions against offending universities, dozens of which came under well-deserved scrutiny. Most cut deals that, at this writing, remain untested—but only after whining about the same free speech and academic freedom principles they have so readily denied others. Yet, none of this has reversed the trend. As recently as October 2025, seven in 10 Americans still thought higher education was “headed in the wrong direction.”
The collapse of public confidence in our colleges and universities has shaken at least one Ivory Tower beyond high-priced lawyering up to defend endowments and bank accounts. In April 2025, Yale University’s new president, Maurie D. McInnis, appointed 10 distinguished members of her institution’s faculty to a “Committee on Trust in Higher Education” charged with preparing a report on the problem. After a year’s labor, last week it released conclusions that any moderately objective critic of academia could have explained to her in 10 minutes. Alas, I was not consulted, but the gist is that most of our citizens believe higher education is too expensive, too arbitrary, and too politically biased to be trustworthy or, ultimately, worthwhile. The committee also raised widely known concerns about grade inflation, new technology, and bureaucratic bloat as if they had just learned about them for the first time.
The distinguished committee members clearly put a lot of effort into what was probably a tedious and uncompensated administrative task. Indeed, their 56-page report’s longest section is its bibliography, which lists primary sources ranging from the American Association of University Professors’ earliest musings on academic freedom in 1915 to recent speeches by Vice President JD Vance and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Secondary works listed include such classics as William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), alongside a predictable plethora of social science and public policy books published within the last two or three years. The committee members congratulate themselves on having talked to “hundreds” of people across so-called “stakeholder groups” as well as to unidentified politicians, unspecified “activists,” nebulous “local community members,” and unnamed but obviously select journalists.
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