With public confidence in the country’s universities on the decline, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education is bringing the conversation to campus.
This week, the recently created committee will launch a speaker series that aims to advance campus dialogue and explore creative solutions to some of the most pressing issues facing higher education.
“The problem of trust in higher education is real and is something that universities need to address,” committee co-chairs and faculty members Julia Adams and Beverly Gage said in a joint statement. “It is also something that colleges and universities have had a part in creating. It is time for university communities to think creatively and start setting the agenda in accord with their own missions and principles.”
The series will kick off Wednesday, Oct. 8, with a conversation between Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis and co-chairs Gage, the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Adams, the Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology, about the committee’s research and discoveries to date. That event, which begins at 4 p.m. in the Schwarzman Center’s President’s Room, is part of Lewis’s ongoing “Dean’s Dialogue” series, which welcomes questions and comments from attendees.
Future speakers include reformers, scholars, and innovators representing a broad spectrum of perspectives, including the political theorist Danielle Allen, whose recent work has focused on civic education, and Carlos Carvalho, the newly appointed president of the University of Austin. All events will be held in person; registration is required.
Yale President Maurie McInnis convened the committee in April with the aim of establishing a better understanding of public perception of higher education and formulating ways to strengthen trust in universities. Since then, the committee has conducted in-depth research into the issues facing higher education and consulted with members of the Yale community — including students, faculty, staff, and alumni — in addition to experts and critics from beyond the campus.
“The trust question involves issues of speech and self-censorship, access and admissions, communications and governance, image and reality,” Gage and Adams said. “Nothing is off the table.”
Digging into the critiques of higher ed
The most recent Gallup data on public trust in higher ed shows that roughly a quarter of U.S. adults have little to no confidence in higher education. About 40% say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in it, well below the 57% majority in the initial Gallup measure in 2015.
Since its creation, the 10-member Yale faculty committee has methodically dug into what’s driving this trend by conducting research, meeting weekly for discussions, and brainstorming possible future paths for Yale and higher education.
The upcoming conversation series and public comments will help to inform the committee’s deliberations and final report, which will be delivered by the end of the 2025-2026 academic year.
“We want to do what universities do best: deep research, thoughtful discussion, approaching issues with an open mind,” Gage said. “Our goal is to use those skills and values to understand the trust problem and chart a path forward.”
In addition to studying recent trends and debates, that work includes taking the long view. Ben Bernard, a postdoctoral fellow in history who works with the committee, wrote his dissertation on debates over moral legitimacy of higher education in Enlightenment-era France. He will teach an undergraduate history seminar next spring, “Trust et Veritas: The Public Legitimacy of Universities,” related to the committee’s work.
The committee invites all members of the Yale community to participate in the upcoming conversation series, as well as to submit comments and suggestions through its web form. Said Adams, “We hope to learn and hear new ideas from these thoughtful critics, as well as learn from different constituencies here on campus about their experiences with some of the issues involved in trust in higher ed.”
All events will take the form of a one-on-one conversation moderated by one of the co-chairs, with time for audience questions, dialogue, and brainstorming.
The first guest speaker in the series will be Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. That event will begin at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4.
On Nov. 12, President McInnis will host an affiliated event as part of her Presidential Lecture Series, featuring a lecture on “How to be a Student in an Era of Anxiety and Political Polarization” by the social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt. Haidt is also the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, co-author of the book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and co-founder of The Constructive Dialogue Institute.
Four additional speakers will join the series in January and February. They are:
- Musa al-Gharbi, an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, who is widely known for his 2024 book, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” (Jan. 13);
- Carlos Carvalho, a professor of statistics, will share his perspective as president of the University of Austin, a newly formed liberal arts university in Austin, Texas (Jan. 21);
- Corey Robin, an American political theorist, journalist, and distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College, who has authored books on the nature and features of modern conservatism, as well as the role of fear in political life (Jan. 28); and
- Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and co-director of AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University, whose work focuses on liberal education, civic thought, and the university’s relationship to society (Feb. 3).
The location of each will be announced closer to the event dates. Other speakers may be added as the series unfolds.
