Breaking the academic filibuster
Early one gray morning in late April 2026, I found myself walking around Copley Square alone, cheering.
I was in Boston for a gathering of people from across the political spectrum worried about the future of small-l liberalism. The city had gone unusually cold overnight, which suited me fine. The Irish, British, and Russian parts of my family tree have never entirely understood why other people complain about gray skies. I went out for coffee before the conference sessions started, and it was just cold enough that I could occasionally see my breath whenever I laughed or took a sip. It made the effect more theatrical than the weather probably deserved, which was unfortunate for anyone hoping not to notice me. My laugh has never been accused of subtlety. To people crossing Copley Square, I probably looked like an overcaffeinated man listening to a playoff game.
But I was actually listening to Yale’s newly released Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which I had converted to an audio file from a PDF, something I do all the time (it lets me keep moving). And every so often, I literally cheered in response to what I was hearing.
Yale president Maurie McInnis had appointed ten faculty members to investigate why Americans had lost so much trust in higher education and what Yale itself ought to do about it. She also gave them wonderfully dangerous instructions for any committee: “think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas.”
They did.
The report confronted problems FIRE and I have been talking about for much of my twenty-five-year career: political homogeneity, free speech, self-censorship, grade inflation, administrative bloat, academic rigor, and the increasingly murky question of what all this enormous institutional machinery was actually for.
It cited a ratio of thirty-six registered Democrats to every Republican across Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Law School, and School of Management. That’s bad, though hardly the worst in elite higher education. Nearly a third of Yale undergraduates did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The median grade was an A. Yale’s published annual cost was $94,425 plus travel. And the real amount of money Yale spends per student per year is probably closer to $200K–which may sound nice until you realize how many students that amount of money could educate the hell out of if spent more judiciously.
But what had me cheering was the premise underneath the report, which was that maybe the public had noticed something.
This sounds like a very low bar until you’ve spent a quarter century watching higher education respond to criticism. I’ve often joked about what I call the Silver Spoon Rule. The name owes a little to the Golden Rule, but much more to the rules preferred by the silver-spoon set: It can never, ever, ever be elite higher education’s own fault… even when it obviously is.
And to my delight, Yale had broken the Silver Spoon Rule.
