Yale’s Shrinking Mission

Yale University’s “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education,” released to great fanfare in April, pulls off the impressive feat of being simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing. It criticizes harshly many of the university’s recent practices while reminding us on nearly every page of Yale’s stellar accomplishments. Woven into the report are reminders of Yale’s age (founded in 1701), wealth ($44 billion endowment) and selectivity (“Yale College rejected nearly 96 percent of the students who applied”). Not to mention its generous financial aid: “Beginning with the 2026–27 academic year, all families with incomes under $200,000 will qualify for free tuition, and those under $100,000 will have all billed expenses (tuition, housing, and food) fully covered.” All this is good news for low-income Yale applicants, but it will only increase pressure on strained budgets at most of the rest of the country’s private colleges, where the median endowment in 2024 was not $44 billion, but $49.6 million.

Many of the report’s 20 recommendations are sound, though as a collection they are a mix of things that have already been frequently said (“take responsibility,” “protect free speech”), things that shouldn’t need to be said (“be human”) and things that lie far beyond the ability of Yale to accomplish for anyone but itself (“make higher education affordable,” “reform undergraduate admissions”). The recommendation to “re-center the classroom” is praiseworthy but also a reminder of how decentered teaching has become at elite research universities. The amount of attention the report has received is less a measure of its originality than a sign of just how obsessively we focus on a small group of hyperselective institutions.

Since Yale is about as representative of American higher education as Patek Philippe is of the watch industry, the report is likely to have little impact beyond the campuses of Ivy-plus universities. Most presidents spend less time worrying about intellectual diversity and grade inflation than they do about structural deficits and enrolling a class large enough to keep the institution solvent. And since the work of one committee has now been handed off to a group of other committees, it is unclear what impact the report is likely to have even at Yale.

In one way, however, it has had an immediate and startling impact—achieved with a speed rarely seen in higher education. Less than three weeks after the report was issued, Yale’s mission statement, adopted only a decade ago, has been revised from this:

to this:

Give Yale credit for chutzpah. It isn’t often that any organization, especially a nonprofit, chooses openly to abandon the mission of improving the world, which is the very basis of its claim to nonprofit, tax-favored status. The National Council of Nonprofits describes such organizations as ones that “provide a way for people to work together for the common good,” which sounds more than a little like improving the world. While I would never suggest that Yale should lose the benefits of its nonprofit status, it is worth asking why an organization that declares no responsibility to advance the public good should receive a public subsidy.

Presumably Yale would argue that the creation and dissemination of knowledge are by default its contribution to the public good. One can, however, create and disseminate knowledge about many things: a new cure for a disease; a new understanding of history; a new reading of Emily Dickinson; a new, more effective land mine; a new way to cause a disease. One can disseminate knowledge about how to be an attorney serving indigent clients or how to manipulate the tax code for maximum gain. Research and teaching are worthy pursuits, but unguided by a commitment to “improving the world” and to ethical principles, they can lead to a retreat into an academic cocoon in which the positive or negative consequences of one’s actions have no relevance.

The line from the now-abandoned mission statement about “aspiring leaders … who serve all sectors of society” probably had to go because it sounded uncomfortably close to improving the world—even though its elimination is Yale pretending for a moment not to be Yale. As Brian Soucek has rightly noted, “Yale exists, in part, to produce ‘aspiring leaders worldwide,’ as its old mission statement more honestly acknowledged. Teaching and research occur across higher ed; grooming Supreme Court justices does not.” Students know why they choose Yale, even if Yale has chosen here not to acknowledge this.

More interesting is the total elimination of the last sentence in the earlier mission statement. Since both the “free exchange of ideas” and ethical behavior would seem to be obvious prerequisites for the creation and dissemination of the kind of knowledge with which a university should be concerned, why would they be erased from the statement? Are these not essential to the mission of Yale?

My guess is that the only problematic word in that sentence was “diverse” and that it was simpler to strike the entire thing than to eliminate one word and draw attention to its presence in the first place. As we know, the road from “diverse” leads only, these days, to canceled research grants and federal investigations, and many universities have gone far beyond anything required by law to demonstrate their indifference to a value they previously claimed to cherish.

In fact, the whole notion of “community” is stripped from the new mission statement. Ten senior faculty members recommended a statement in which the reference to other meaningful actors within and beyond the university is eliminated, the pre-eminence of faculty is underscored, and the idea of the university as a community of interdependent constituencies is erased. In the earlier statement, students were active participants in the “free exchange of ideas”; in the revised statement, they are present only by implication, as the passive recipients of “teaching.”

The revision to the Yale mission statement seems like the natural next step in the post-Gaza, post-Trump embrace of “institutional neutrality.” No longer is it enough to say that universities will take no positions on divisive political and social issues. Now they should remain neutral on the question of whether their work does or does not “improve the world today and for future generations.” While some see this as progress, I am inclined to agree with Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth and see it as a “defense strategy” that is making a “terrible situation worse.” The recommendation in the report to “support academic freedom” is essential at a time when that freedom is under unprecedented attack in the public sphere, but it seems in tension with the more cloistered, more apolitical university envisioned by the report’s authors.

Writing of the now-deleted portion of the mission statement, the members of the Yale committee contend that “These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university.” They could not be more wrong. The creation and dissemination of knowledge are only part of what “makes a university a university”—necessary but not sufficient conditions. Absent a commitment to the public good and the open exchange of ideas conducted on an ethical foundation, a university might be indistinguishable from a pharmaceutical or technology company. The very things that Yale has unwisely chosen to minimize are precisely those things that define the special place of a university in society. My hope—perhaps quixotic—is that few institutions will follow their example.