Faculty report considers decline in trust

Mark Alden Branch ’86

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Last year, when President Maurie McInnis ’96PhD announced the appointment of a committee of ten tenured faculty members to investigate the problem of declining trust in higher education, some people were skeptical. “Faculties are too much a part of that which needs investigating,” one of our readers wrote, “and no group should be asked to investigate itself.”

But if there were doubts that the committee was willing to take a hard look in the mirror, they were erased by the report that came out on April 15. The 58-page document doesn’t treat the issue of trust as merely a public relations problem; it lists a number of ways Yale and other universities have contributed to the rising distrust, and just as many recommendations to help restore that trust. 

“It became clear that this was not just an issue of communication,” says Beverly Gage ’94, cochair of the committee and the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History. “There were substantive issues to take on.”

Over a year’s time, the group read scholarly and policy literature, news coverage, and polling data; and it solicited comments online, in public listening sessions, and in conversations with people at Yale and beyond. 

“We tried to talk to the widest possible range of constituencies,” says Gage.
The committee’s report identifies three major areas that contribute to public distrust: the high cost of higher education, the opacity of the admissions process, and issues around free speech and political bias. The recommendations in those areas include expanding free tuition to more Yale College students; increasing transparency about cost; reducing the admissions preference for athletes, legacies, and children of faculty, staff, and donors; establishing minimum test scores for undergraduate admissions; and undertaking “a multi-pronged series of initiatives and experiments, with the goal of enhancing open and critical debate on campus.”

Other recommendations address grades and the classroom experience: a device-free policy in classrooms; the adoption of “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard” to combat grade inflation; and the reporting on transcripts of the student’s percentile ranking in each course as a way of clarifying a student’s performance beyond a letter grade.

Yale almost immediately adopted one of the committee’s recommendations—two weeks after the report was issued—prompting both praise and criticism. On April 29, as the committee had suggested, the university replaced the mission statement it had adopted in 2016—which included “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community”—and replaced it with one from the Faculty Handbook that says simply, “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” 

While the committee described the change as offering “clarity of purpose,” some saw it as capitulation to the Trump administration and critics of DEI programs. In a Yale Daily News op-ed, Law School professor Ian Ayres ’81, ’86JD, wrote: “The proposal, far from being directed to the public, is primarily aimed at placating the tyrant in chief who has recklessly targeted a number of our peers. . . . Public trust is not built by quietly retiring institutional commitments in advance of pressure. It is built by standing behind them under pressure.”

But overall, the report was largely greeted with intense interest and pleasant surprise. “I’ve been amazed by the size and the breadth of the reaction, and the people that have contacted us from all over the globe,” says cochair Julia Adams, the Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology. “That’s actually been stunning to me, and I think it just underlines the importance of the moment.”

The report’s recommendations range from the specific to the very general, and some of them would take years and significant cultural change to implement. But Gage says she’s happy with the result so far. “We never expected that this would be the final word, but we did hope this would start a conversation.”