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.

Yet they even deigned to open a public comment page, which appears to have exposed them—perhaps for the first time in their lives—to the notion that a great many people among the general population do not believe Yale faculty members are objective or self-reflective enough to carry out a reform of higher education.

To paraphrase Buckley, the first 10 names in the New Haven phonebook would probably have done a better, faster, and more convincing job of spelling out what is wrong and what ought to be done. Leaving aside the report’s cursory analysis, its 20 recommendations call to mind a watered-down glass of lemonade. It might temporarily quench one’s thirst but it could never hydrate anyone enough to traverse a desert or survive a plunge off the looming college enrollment cliff.

Many of the recommendations are platitudinous and raise more questions than they answer. The committee members, for example, urge university communities to “take responsibility,” by which they mean being “willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve.” That may sound courageous, at least until one reflects on why this constructive mindset, which can be found at any neighborhood car wash asking for customer feedback, had never occurred to them before. They also advocate for “open minds,” nobly arguing that “great teaching and scholarship require contestation.” Despite having spent decades on one of America’s putatively best campuses, they hazard no guess as to why such “contestation” is no longer happening, or what one must do to restore it.

When the committee calls upon Yalies to “pay attention” and “re-center the classroom,” they zero in specifically on limiting classroom mobile device use, something I did in my happily abandoned academic career when the first iPhone came out 20 years ago. How have they been running their classrooms for all these years? They probably did not mean to evoke the image of a hapless and tweedy fool reading from yellowed old notes while class after class of millennial and Gen Z students scrolled through their Instagram feeds, oblivious to the joys of Chaucer—but that is precisely what this description conjures. Another recommendation, “communicate effectively,” is reduced to “having something credible to say.” Are they admitting the possibility that Yale—or even higher education generally—does not have anything credible to say or, if it does, that it cannot say it? Again, we are left wondering why such problems emerged in the first place.

The report’s more pragmatic recommendations barely rise above milquetoast palliatives that many critics of higher education have been advocating for years. Of course, bureaucracy should be reduced. But for those who grew up, studied, and then worked as academics before university administrative bloat got out of control, why was it “remarkably difficult” for this committee to determine “what share of Yale’s resources should be devoted to its core academic functions and what share is not?” For all their stakeholder outreach and detailed research, the committee members do not appear to have examined any university’s budget, publicly available tax filings, or even the complaints of their own campus newspapers. Admissions certainly should be fairer and free of group preferences, but why does the report make only a passing mention of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that outlawed any consideration of race in admissions?

In their enjoinder to “make higher education affordable,” the committee members predictably call for more generous financial aid but do not even try to answer the two most obvious questions: how and why college became so unaffordable? Since their report was commissioned by their institution’s president, it is not hard to guess whom they might have feared antagonizing if, for example, they took a hard look at senior administrative salaries. As in so many other parts of the report, the committee members are utterly incapable of asking the right questions, and thus they cannot articulate any serious solutions. If we assume, just on a lark, that university administrators are self-dealing shysters uninterested in meaningful reform but fearful of government sanctions, that could be intentional.

The only thing the report does well is hijack the reform recommendation process to advance what the committee members seem to want most: expanding their own power as faculty members. Nowhere is this clearer than in their recommendation to “govern collaboratively.” Extolling “shared governance” between administration and faculty is a well-trodden path for faculty—though it is usually unsuccessfully trodden. But here the report’s authors unabashedly “recommend that faculty-led committees be involved in all major academic and institutional reforms.” In other words, they believe the people who created the problems should also have a major role in recommending reforms. When was that ever a good idea?

Diving deeper to address political bias and the lack of viewpoint diversity, the committee recommends departmental “self-studies” to identify the causes of this imbalance and how to address them. Again, the visible problem would be assessed and possibly addressed by the people who created it, not by anyone who might be objective, unbiased, or—heaven forbid—critical of the faculty or its handiwork. Can anyone seriously imagine a history department studying itself and reaching the conclusion that it has been teaching history poorly all along, or a gender studies department concluding that it does not sufficiently include men’s issues or perspectives? The mere suggestion evokes phoenixes, unicorns, and a bridge in Brooklyn.

While competent reformers might have argued that institutional trustees should make greater use of their fiduciary authority and other oversight powers, the committee members merely accept that trustees are “distant from day-to-day life on campus.” That is a huge problem the report does not even attempt to address, but it does urge boards to include and rely on more faculty representatives, who the authors suppose would “assist the trustees in enhancing the university’s mission.” That sounds rather like suggesting the Justice Department include more drug dealers to assist in the enforcement of our anti-drug laws while U.S. attorneys spend more time on vacation.

“Each of the issues described in this report,” the lugubrious text pointlessly concludes, “has proven resistant to reform.” As written, neither the report nor anyone who takes it seriously will overcome such resistance. Without bolder thinking about the future of higher education, it could all go bust. That process, as Ernest Hemingway might have put it, could unfold “gradually and then suddenly.” But the slow part may already be over.