What the Yale Report Missed

The writer is a current president.

For all the aspects of the Yale report that resonate with me, one strikes me as missing the mark—and in doing so potentially reinforcing one of the more trenchant critiques of how higher education has lost its way.

The committee objects that Yale’s mission has evolved to include goals such as educating “aspiring leaders worldwide” and “improving the world today.” Although acknowledging that these are worthy goals, the committee emphasizes that “they are not what makes a university a university.” It urges that Yale restate and refocus its mission instead on the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge through research and teaching.

Having spent more than two decades in leadership at a university akin to Yale, I certainly agree that that the advancement of knowledge is among the essential goals of a research university. But I can’t help but wonder whether the refocused statement largely makes students incidental to Yale’s mission, not central to it. If so, it risks amplifying the criticism that, in service to other objectives, we are increasingly ignoring our responsibility to focus on what students need to succeed in a challenging and ever-changing world. All this at a time when the perceived cost of higher education is what it is.

I don’t want to overstate the case. We know that students attend college—and graduate school—to engage in the dynamic exploration and creation of knowledge, including through the teaching they receive. Exposing students to new fields of knowledge and new perspectives is intrinsic to the intellectual and personal growth we want for students. Beyond that, the committee itself recommends that Yale actively “help translate a liberal arts education into successful professional and civic life”—though it elaborates neither on how Yale should do so nor on how the narrowed “knowledge-based” mission advances that objective.

My concern comes down to the goals of an undergraduate education—and how students should be located in those goals. Students attend college not simply to be part of a knowledge-creation enterprise built mainly on faculty intellectual interests. They enroll as well for very personal reasons—to grow and to be better prepared for the life that awaits them. That takes more than knowledge creation and dissemination, and even excellent teaching, as important as those are; it is also about fostering skills and habits of being that will permit students to lead the lives they want to lead.

Some of the skills students need to succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s world—such as leadership, communication, resiliency, intercultural fluency, and teamwork—aren’t fostered exclusively or perhaps even principally through the pursuit of knowledge. They are honed through the entirety of the student’s experiences on campus. In classes but also through service on the student newspaper. In labs but also in sororities. Yale supports an athletic program presumably because it recognizes that intercollegiate competition can be a powerful part of a student’s growth.

Given this, I cannot help but pause over the proposed mission statement. My concern is about more than semantics; a mission statement ultimately speaks to what an institution values. Yale has more than 13,000 students, nearly 7,000 enrolled at Yale College. Shouldn’t they, too, be reflected in the mission? More to the point, shouldn’t the principal purpose of an undergraduate education (including at Yale College) be centered on the students? If not, why not refashion the university as a research institute?

Lest this all seem abstract, let’s consider a different recommendation from the Yale report, one focused on “streamlin[ing] bureaucracy.” The report suggests a review be done to measure the “administrative structure … against the [university’s] academic mission” (emphasis mine). But if the academic mission is narrowly defined as knowledge creation and dissemination, does that mean that the co-curricular activities that students cherish and from which they also learn risk being seen as “administrative bloat”?

This leads to my final observation, less a critique of the report than about the committee’s composition. The Yale committee had 10 members, all from the faculty. Although several of the members serve as program directors, there were no members of the Yale community whose full-time job involved engaging with students outside the classroom. No one from student life, no one from a career center, no one from athletics, no one from campus wellness. As the saying goes, “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Is it a surprise, therefore, that a faculty-only committee at an elite research university did not organize its recommendations with student outcomes and aspirations among its principal considerations?

Let me be clear: I agree with the fundamental thrust of the Yale report. Higher education needs to take seriously and take some responsibility for the decline in trust we’re experiencing. I am skeptical, however, that an approach that decenters one of the very populations we are intending to serve—our students—is a path to improvement.

I would hope every institution that enrolls undergraduates start with the premise that students are fundamental to our mission.