Trust Isn’t the Issue

For decades the U.S. has taken justifiable pride in its higher education system being the envy of the world and the entity most responsible for its economic dominance. Despite this historic confidence, a rising chorus now warns it is misplaced. Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, put it succinctly, “we have seen significant erosion of trust.”

Accepting this widely repeated view as fact, many universities are taking steps. Among them, Yale University recently published its “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” Last fall, the new president of the University of Texas at Austin promised that under his leadership UT “will be a model of public trust in higher education.”

Should the U.S. public worry that the more than 1.5 million teaching faculty in the country are untrustworthy? Is the education of an estimated 15 million-plus undergraduates at risk?

In a word, no. There is no crisis of trust. There is a crisis of truth.

Higher education is thriving. The Common App reported in March that applications were up 5 percent compared to the year before, with “a whopping 2.1 million increase from just four years ago.” At my own institution, the number of undergraduate applications has risen so fast that each of the past three years has been a record high.

In even greater news, a recent study suggests that trust is high, in that students see advantages in getting a degree. A Gallup/Lumina Foundation report released in February documents that 93 percent of four-year college students believe their degree is worthwhile, 88 percent are confident it will help them secure a job they want, and 70 percent agree they “can express their opinions freely on campus.” Additionally, two-thirds of students say the majority of “their faculty members actively encourage students to share their views.”

Still, despite the strong evidence to the contrary, the idea that there is a lack of trust persists. According to the Yale report, universities are primarily to blame.

Not only have they failed on cost, admissions and academic matters (especially related to free speech and grading practices), but, most importantly, they have, by drifting from their core mission, encouraged “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. … Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.”

To be sure, the Yale report has many excellent recommendations, including ideas for greater access and transparency (especially in admissions), reducing costs for students, and ensuring academic freedom.

But where the report falls short is on the larger 21st-century context. The report ends its discussion of “political pressure” in the 1970s. Similarly, higher ed leaders, like the ones at Vanderbilt and UT Austin quoted earlier, tend to be opaque about the reasons for the loss of trust. What needs to be acknowledged and understood is that the far right has had higher education in its sights for a very long time.

As far back as 2004, Ben Shapiro’s polemic, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, harangued: “Universities push a never-ending line of liberal claptrap.” In the 2010s, the attacks intensified. Activist Charlie Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 and four years later launched the “Professor Watchlist,” intended to “expose and document” instructors who “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” After Kirk’s murder in fall 2025 the organization reported “unprecedented growth.”

As the Turning Point watchlist launched, Milo Yiannopoulos, then an editor for Breitbart News, toured campuses to attack, among other things, “social justice ideologies.” His talks were controversial; there were vigorous protests and some of his appearances were canceled out of safety concerns. An even more pointed anti-higher education voice has been Christopher Rufo, who across 2022–25, called for the nation “to lay siege to our institutions” of higher education and put “them in an existential terror.”

Republican leaders were quick to embrace the activists’ accusations. In 2021, JD Vance proposed in his talk “The Universities Are the Enemy” that “to do the things we want to do. … We have to … attack the universities.” The vice president didn’t start the GOP attacks, but the administration he serves has been, as Politico put it, “intensifying a yearslong effort to hobble the campuses they say breed progressive ideology by casting them not as spaces of innovation, but as hotbeds of hate.” Current higher education leadership is largely silent on the full impact of a quarter century of assaults on the nation’s colleges and universities.

University leadership and politicians have promoted solutions. These include the embrace of “viewpoint” (or intellectual, ideological, political) “diversity,” a benign-sounding term that is little more than a partisan goal, as humanities professor Lisa Siraganian has demonstrated. No one can seem to define it beyond the idea it will “prevent further trouble with Republicans,” as one self-identified conservative Harvard University professor explained. Even the Trump administration does not seem to know what it means, although it demanded it of Harvard last year, and, as The New York Times reported, “it has been taken up by politicians who promote it as a counterpart—some would say a counterpunch—to efforts to promote racial and ethnic diversity.”

On the political side, various states have enacted legislation and policies limiting academic freedom. Earlier this year, the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors removed sociology from the general education curriculum at the state’s 12 public universities. Chancellor Brandon Creighton of the Texas Tech University System has directed the elimination of academic programs focused on sexual orientation and gender identity. In Indiana, public colleges and universities proposing new degree programs “have to explain to the state how they will promote American values” under a new policy announced in November.

Last year, the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans believe higher education is “going in the wrong direction.” Similarly, Gallup reported in 2023& that “Americans’ confidence in higher education continues to fall.” These aggregate numbers elide an important truth: While confidence levels are down among all groups, the decline in trust is greatest among Republicans. Jon Fansmith, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, commented in 2023: “It’s not an equal distribution across political affiliation. It’s not widespread disenchantment with higher education. It’s very concentrated … and you worry about the implications of that for public policy.”

Research has documented that “states with stable, bipartisan education policies see better student outcomes, while those experiencing frequent partisan conflicts suffer from academic disruptions.” Fear and chaos do not produce excellence in teaching and learning. Uncertainty and intimidation do not foster innovation and transformation.

These attacks in the name of trust are damaging our excellent institutions. As Brandon Busteed wrote in Forbes, “[f]rom a talent and economic development perspective, this partisan divide on education will go down as one of the most damaging trends in U.S. history. … When institutions and issues reach extreme divides, progress—regardless of which or any direction—gets stymied.”

The damage is well underway. The prestigious journal Nature documented the cancellation or suspension of almost 8,000 federal research grants in the first year of Trump’s term, with the administration’s cutting funding for politically disfavored topics. Red states are experiencing a brain drain. Nevertheless, the damage does not have to be permanent.

Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth has offered a pointed rebuttal to the usual rhetoric we hear from university leadership, suggesting in an op-ed that Yale with its report has missed the plot. What “the Trump administration has been punishing are prerequisites for higher education to flourish—independent thought, a commitment to truth even when it’s inconvenient and a focus on the creation of truly democratic citizens,” Roth wrote. “Endangering these ideals endangers the whole operation. Yale and other elite universities should find the courage to say so.”

The evidence demonstrates that the majority of the country values higher education. Colleges and universities must urge skepticism when it comes to policy by sound bite and ignore the fever dreams of ideologues. Additionally, the country as a whole needs to stop judging higher education by the Ivy League—which educates a minuscule proportion of undergraduates and charges far more than any public institution (UT Austin’s annual tuition is $10–13,000 for state residents and Yale’s an eye-watering $72,500)—and turn its attention to where most students matriculate, its public universities.

Finally, higher education needs to trust itself by using its prodigious research and teaching abilities to disprove lies and connect with the national majority who believe in the freedom to learn. That is the most effective way to keep building and improving the institutions that offer the best means of social mobility and inclusion in the nation’s history.