To President McInnis:
In April 2025, you asked our committee to examine the problem of declining trust in higher education. Your charge emphasized the need to engage a variety of perspectives, both within the university and beyond. While you specified a few important issues, such as the problem of self- censorship on campus, you afforded our committee a broad mandate to conduct our work as we saw fit. We now submit this report of our deliberations and recommendations.
We undertook this task at a difficult moment for higher education in the United States. You encouraged us to take the long view. As you noted, the problem of declining trust did not emerge out of nowhere over the past few months or years. Nor is it a challenge that will be met through short-term solutions. We welcomed your call to think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.
Our research took us in many directions. We discussed tuition prices and admissions policy, political bias on campus and technology in the classroom, self-censorship and university governance and grade inflation. We examined what other universities were doing and tried to figure out how Yale measures up. Our research engaged issues of public trust—what the university looks like from the outside in—but also complementary issues of trust within the university itself.
We believe the issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed. We focused our recommendations on Yale, but we hope they may prove useful to others in higher education as well.
Our committee’s work brought us face to face with some of higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots. At the same time, we were heartened by the widespread enthusiasm for what colleges and universities do, and what they can yet be.