If you’ve been paying attention to US higher education for the last couple of weeks, you will no doubt have noted a report from Yale University on “Trust in Higher Education”, with much favorable and unfavorable commentary. But what does it really say? And does it make much sense, for Yale or higher education generally, either in the United States or elsewhere?
So, one thing that is important to understand about this is that while it contains ten sections, it is really three separate and loosely connected set of documents. The first three sections function as a kind of introduction, the next six are a kind of diagnostic if problems affecting higher education in the United States, and the final chapter is a set of recommendations for Yale. The first of these is not very important. The second is, in my humble opinion, not quite a travesty but certainly tendentious when applied to American higher education as a whole. And the third is a mix of the intriguing and the banal.
The introduction is important to read closely because it is here that the central problem of the paper emerges. Yale President Maurie McInnis’ original charge to the group of ten professors who wrote the report was incredibly vague, saying only that she had “convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education as we all work together to shape Yale’s future”. It is never made entirely clear why a report meant as an input to internal planning efforts needed to look at trust in American higher education writ large. What that means is that the link between the second and third parts of the document feels forced. The diagnostic is about American higher education as a whole, but the recommendations are Yale-specific. As a result, you get both diagnostics which don’t have a lot to do with Yale, and recommendations which don’t necessarily have a lot to do with the diagnostics.
Anyways, on to the diagnostic sections. Very briefly, the authors of the report identify six significant problems in American higher education. They are: cost, admissions, free speech/self-censorship, “political pluralism”, “the classroom” (by which they mean grading), and university governance. And yes, if you want to identify six issues that regularly make the pages of the New York Times, probably five of those six – governance being the exception – probably fit the bill. Are they actually the reason why trust in education is declining? Perhaps, but the available evidence isn’t particularly persuasive: there is a lot of correlation equals causation handwaving going on here. And I for one think it’s pretty clear that at least four of these issues are pretty specific to the Ivies rather than to the American higher education writ large, which begs a whole bunch of questions about how they can actually be responsible for a national decline in trust in HE.
(As a Canadian observer of all this, it does strike me as a missed opportunity that it did not occur to the Yale team to use international comparisons as a set of counterfactuals to inform what, specific conditions about the US are driving the drop in trust. I would argue, for instance, that the fact that institutions in other anglosphere countries in the anglosphere are facing similar loss of stature even though they lack America’s system of holistic admissions might suggest that this particular factor isn’t particularly decisive. But I guess if they don’t have the imagination to distinguish between ivies and publics within America it’s unrealistic to think they might look at other national experiences for insight. C’est la vie.)
Still, a focus on these six issues might generate some insight, right? Well, no. For all the learned citations, the analyses are pretty much all of the “broad brush” variety which fail to capture much in the way of nuance, and there is little in the way of suggestions that would seem out of place in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. The section lamenting the lack of political pluralism in the academy for instance, laments the leftward tilt of voting habits of the professoriate without once mentioning that the US right has become completely anti-science and has put a set of anti-vaxxing assclowns in charge of public health – is simply unserious (but possibly par for the course for the university whose law school gave us JD Vance). Only one of the sections – the one on holistic admissions – is genuinely interesting/challenging – but more on that in a second.
From this series of relatively banal pieces of analysis springs a set of recommendations specific to Yale which range from the hilariously meaningless (“take responsibility”, “communicate effectively”, “lead by example”) to the worthy but boring (“reduce administration”, “govern in a collegial manner”), to – in a few cases, some genuinely interesting ideas. I will focus on four in particular:
Grading: The recommendation that will probably generate the most heat inside Yale itself is the one with respect to grading, where, after noting that the percentage of A grades awarded at Yale College has grown from 10% sixty years ago to nearly 80% today, suggests re-introducing a grading curve with a 3.0 mean and/or asking the registrar to alter transcripts so that individual grades can be easily compared to class averages. I don’t personally think this is a great idea – grading on the curve means the actual grade is relative rather than absolute – but it’s still radical and thought-provoking, which was presumably the point of the exercise.
Device-free classrooms: The report’s authors are pretty all-in on the need to Make Classrooms Great Again. Intriguingly, though, this does not lead them to suggest anything with respect to upgrading professors’ pedagogical skills; rather, it means creating more “focus” in the classroom by – for instance – making sure that they are device-free. One suspects this will go over like a ton of bricks with the student body.
Common Civics Lessons: The most straightforwardly nostalgic of the recommendations is the one recommending that, in the name of creating “common knowledge” Yale develop “a civic education initiative that would reach every first-year undergraduate on a regular basis”. Sounds a bit like a common curriculum, no? Except of course profs could never agree on what that means, so the group instead suggests day-long programs at least three times per year, each devoted to a core dimension of informed citizenship. Not sure how this would work exactly, but interesting to see where this idea goes.
Reform admissions: This recommendation is the one which would have the most profound effects across the Ivies is it were adopted. The committee is deeply skeptical with respect to holistic admissions (see here for more on this concept), not because they think it is wrong necessarily but because it’s really hard to explain and creates a lot of situations which look unfair. However, their ideas for reform (more testing! Even maybe a Yale-specific entrance test!) are pretty brain dead, aren’t anything to write home about. More promising here is their suggestion to reduce the use of legacy preferences (but not end, because oh my).
Anyways, there you have it. It’s a weak report about higher education in America, but potentially not a bad set of recommendations for Yale itself. A couple of things might make it important for a year or two, but no one is going to remember this twenty years from now.
