Yale! When it comes to academic freedom, heal thyself!

Yale tells the rest of the world what's "wrong" with higher education while throwing their own faculty under the bus.

There has been much sturm and more than a little drang following the release of Yale’s internally authored report considering the problem of public “trust” in higher education. Seemingly on behalf of the more than 4000 degree-granting post-secondary educational institutions - the vast majority of which are nothing like Yale - Yale donned the hairshirt and confessed the sins of the collective.

While few if anyone would deny that post-secondary institutions have work to do in order to better fulfill their purported missions, there were significant gaps in the story Yale wanted to tell. Thankfully, Bradford Vivian is here to help give the context that Yale’s report is missing. - John Warner

Bradford Vivian is a professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His latest book is Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press). He has also published commentaries on free speech, academic freedom, higher education, and democracy in Time, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed.

The Yale Report Fails to Acknowledge Censorship and Threats to Academic Freedom
By Bradford Vivian

In April of this year, the Yale University Committee on Trust in Higher Education issued a much-publicized report intended “to examine the problem of declining trust in higher education.” The document and its public reception warrants prolonged scrutiny because the committee claimed to speak for the state of higher education in general as well as at Yale specifically. It is therefore designed to have wide-ranging ramifications for all colleges and universities.

The report is arguably the most newsworthy instance to date of an argument about American higher education that has become especially popular across the sociopolitical spectrum: higher education has lost the trust of the public because of its many alleged failures. Who and what does the conceit that universities have lost public trust and must atone for their ostensible sins really serve? The Yale report answers this question inadvertently, allowing us to better understand how even some groups within academia are finding ways to rationalize unprecedented levels of government censorship and restrictions on academic freedom.

Judging by its reception, the report clearly serves the ideological (non-scholarly) agenda of groups beyond academia that maintain a strongly adversarial relationship to contemporary universities. The Wall Street Journal editorial board celebrated the report as welcome confirmation of its consistent diatribes about higher education: “The American academy isn’t known for its self-reflection, but maybe the political criticism of recent years is having a useful effect. A report last week by Yale University contains a surprising dose of self-examination.” (The WSJ editorial board is apparently unfamiliar with faculty senate subcommittees.) The editorial board emphasizes the symmetry of the report with its own prior polemics about academia: “Readers of these pages know the critique.”

Heterodox Academy, a major source of misinformation about higher education over the past decade, similarly takes explicit credit for the Yale report as an extension of its own ideological agenda: “Yale’s ‘Trust’ Report Affirms HxA’s Reform Agenda — And Our Members Helped.” Representatives of Heterodox Academy insist that they have sought to positively reform higher education over the past decade by promoting intellectual diversity and constructive disagreement in universities. In truth, the organization has popularized misleading pseudoscientific characterizations of “coddled” students, repressive “liberal orthodoxy” and “witch hunts,” the reputed evils of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” “cancel culture,” and “mob justice” on college campuses. These characterizations are not only misleading; numerous state and federal measures have frequently cited such tropes as pretexts for political censorship of universities since 2020.

These two examples show how the Yale report recycles polemical and empirically dubious narratives about higher education even though a faculty committee drafted it.

The report, in other words, is not really a report. It’s a mixture of mediocre punditry and public relations strategy. The conceit of “trust” in this context does not describe a meaningful scholarly analysis of relations between universities and the public. A meaningful analysis would emphasize practices and policies (not anecdotes and subjective impressions), a cross-section of data from both peer institutions and other higher education sectors (not isolated polling and cherry-picked selected data points), and nonpartisan scholarly sources (not an overrepresentation of hyper-partisan groups).

Calling the Yale document a report is a rhetorical device to manage institutional reputation in a time of aggressive government censorship and assaults on academic freedom as well as institutional autonomy. The “report” effects a performative display of guilt in the face of such rising authoritarianism. Its content likely reflects a desire to maintain avenues for fundraising with donors while attempting to placate a presidential administration keen to withhold federal grants and concoct reputationally damaging federal investigations.

This ethos is particularly clear in the report’s bibliography. Its list of citations privileges documents from political think tanks aligned with the current presidential administration that have long sought to diminish public trust in American higher education. Negatively affecting the public reputation of colleges and universities to justify severe cuts to their funding (and the taxes that provide that funding) has been an obvious strategy for members of such cited groups as the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, and America First Committee. A committee of university faculty that says it wants to restore public trust by relying on (mis)information from political groups that have tried to diminish such trust sends a confused and confusing message indeed.

The most significant aspect of the Yale “report,” however, concerns what it does not say. In claiming to address a crisis moment for universities, the “report” never mentions presently historic levels of government censorship in higher education and political restrictions on academic freedom. PEN America chillingly summarized the state of such censorship in January of this year: “Government censorship of free speech and academic freedom has reached unprecedented heights on U.S. campuses as lawmakers extend a web of political and ideological control over the sector. More than half of U.S. college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate.” That New McCarthyism simply isn’t part of the reality that the Yale “report” describes.

The Yale University AAUP chapter confirms this glaring omission with its own report on the endangered state of academic freedom at their institution. The chapter’s newly released survey indicates that “a substantial portion of Yale faculty perceives a significant deterioration in their ability to teach, research, and express ideas amidst a deeply politicized higher education environment since January 2025.” It also suggests that Yale faculty members are being forced to assume political risk in defense of academic freedom while the leadership of the university, judging by its report on trust in higher education, refuses to assume that risk itself.

Silence on rising levels of government censorship characterizes that refusal in its much-publicized committee report. A discussion of dated campus controversy over Halloween costumes? Yes. Vague allusions to some professors feeling they must “refrain from saying what they really think?” Yes. Professed fears of “cancel culture?” Of course. And, bizarrely, digressions about college-aged young people, social media, and smart phones? For whatever reason, yes. But the document simply chooses not to acknowledge the highest levels of government assaults on individual rights, free expression, and open inquiry aimed at American universities in decades. Some of the most alarming examples include government bans on lists of words and concepts in universities, the state-mandated elimination of entire academic programs, and the arbitrary termination of previously awarded research grants through peer-reviewed, merit-based review—all for purely ideological purposes.

In the end, the Yale “report” inadvertently but clearly shows how the conceit that universities have allegedly lost public trust accommodates censorship. That conceit allows a specially appointed university committee to research “loss of trust” in higher education in ways that appease political censors without ever acknowledging that such censorship exists.

Recent events demonstrate the strategic folly of attempting to curry favor with the current leadership of federal agencies by adopting the polemical premise that universities have lost trust with the public. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice under the Trump administration announced an investigation into the Yale University medical school for allegedly “discriminating against applicants based on race by unlawfully giving Black and Hispanic applicants an advantage in admissions”—a spurious legal position that it has previously used to extract funds and ideological concessions from other schools.

Substantive discussions of higher education as a public trust and the need to both build and maintain trust among stakeholders and the public are always vital. But the Yale “report” is a poor and dishonest way to pursue that vital work. The most important phenomenon that U.S. higher education faces in the current moment of crisis is not an apparent loss of public trust, but rampant and well-documented political censorship.

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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.