The Academic Value of Trust

The concept of trust is front and center in contemporary discussions about the crisis in higher education. Hardly a week goes by without someone flagging the Gallup poll showing that trust in higher education is at or near an all-time low. In response, universities are taking action. Recent reports like the ones out of Yale and Harvard Universities are pitched as solutions to the growing trust deficit. Yet some critics of this work insist that it’s not a breach of trust for universities to expand their mission and even that “trust is not an academic value.” Higher ed reformers are tilting at windmills.

To see who’s right, we need to disambiguate two different questions about trust in higher education. The first is empirical: Why has trust in higher education cratered over the last decade? No doubt the answer to this question is complicated. The causal factors behind the trust deficit are likely to be many and varied. We should look to the social sciences to help untangle them.

None of this complexity should have any bearing on the second question about trust. This question is not empirical but normative: Is the reduction in trust reasonable? Answering this second question requires us to go beyond social science to ask whether trust is an academic value and about the conditions under which that trust is properly earned.

I will offer an answer to the second question. Trust is an academic value. It’s an essential feature of our division of epistemic labor and something that will be either earned or squandered by institutions of higher education. While I’m less confident about the causal drivers of the recent trust gap, I’m far more confident that it is rational for people to trust universities less than they did 20 years ago.

2 Types of Trust

There are no doubt many different conceptualizations of trust, but two in particular are relevant for higher education: epistemic trust and social trust.

Epistemic trust is a willingness to rely on someone else’s knowledge. When you defer to your financial adviser’s expertise on which companies are profitable, that’s a kind of epistemic trust. You are acting on the assumption that this person knows something that you don’t. When you decide that you will do your own research instead of deferring to an expert, that shows a lack of epistemic trust on your part.

The second kind of trust is social trust. Social trust is a willingness to rely on someone else to do the right thing. When you say that you trust the police, you are saying that you are comfortable relying on them to do their jobs well and protect you from harm. On the other hand, when you sack your lawn-care company because they do shoddy work, that’s a lack of social trust on your part. You no longer trust those people to do the job they are supposed to do.

So, epistemic trust is about relying on others to know certain things whereas social trust is about relying on others to do certain things. Both kinds of trust are academically valuable.

Epistemic trust is valuable any time there is a division of epistemic labor. As a group, humans know an awful lot. As individuals, we don’t. Instead, we have specialized, concentrated knowledge for specific jobs and careers. We develop expertise at the individual level and then share that knowledge with the group. And as C. P. Snow illustrated many years ago in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, universities are paradigm examples of a division of epistemic labor. Most scientists are entirely unfamiliar with the research in the humanities, and as Snow cataloged, very few humanists have a serviceable grasp of basic scientific concepts and practices.

Universities rely on epistemic trust to fill in this gap. Internally, virtually every faculty activity takes for granted a deep epistemic trust in others. Any time we teach a finding from a scientific paper, any time we accept data in an experiment from a graduate student and any time we formulate a research question based on the results of prior work, we are placing epistemic trust in others. For example, I’ve never looked at the raw data supporting the classic studies on conformity bias. Should I still teach it to my students? If so, I’m trusting that another expert got things right. This is what explains why the replication crisis in the social sciences is so serious.

So, the critic of academic trust John K. Wilson is mistaken when he argues,

This couldn’t be more wrong. We are intellectually forced to trust scholars, professors and other experts at nearly every turn. The university simply couldn’t work if every faculty member were required to “do her own research” for any claim she needs in either teaching or research. Any introductory course in philosophy would make the point clear: We can’t have arguments for all of our premises; reasoning has to start from somewhere. Worse, most of us are in no position to verify the claims coming out of the different corners of campus. Asking me to verify whether a vaccine is safe would amount to an egregious form of epistemic trespassing on my part.

In fact, Wilson has it exactly backward. While no doubt it’s appropriate for academics to challenge one another, replicate studies and the like, the upshot isn’t that trust isn’t an academic value. Rather, it’s that we don’t face a false binary between trust and scrutiny. Both play important roles in the academic endeavor. We challenge and scrutinize one another’s work precisely because other people (including other scholars) will trust that work afterward. We demand evidence up front to ensure that our downstream trust is well placed.

Externally, universities also rely on epistemic trust: We want the public to believe what we say.

Nonexperts are unable to understand the primary sources, raw data and theoretical considerations that lead faculty to the conclusions they draw. That’s the very point of having experts. Yet, we think members of the public can know that the COVID vaccine prevents hospitalizations, the climate is slowly changing and that rent-control policies often backfire. If they know these things, it must be because of the epistemic trust they have in the experts. There’s a cottage industry of books describing the importance of public trust in expertise and the role such trust plays in a healthy democracy (among other things).

If we don’t think that nonexperts should rely on experts to figure out what the world is like, the university is built on a false premise. The research wing of the university mission is explicitly tied to the discovery of truth or the production of knowledge. But if the people outside the university shouldn’t trust what the experts within the university discover, that transmission of knowledge doesn’t take place. Every one of us implicitly trusts universities and the work of credentialed experts every time we take a drug or get behind the wheel of a car.

Like epistemic trust, social trust is just as important for the work of the university. Recall that social trust is a reliance on others that they will do certain things rather than know certain things. Social trust of this sort is required any time there is a social contract. When you buy something sight unseen on the internet, you are exhibiting social trust in the seller. If you didn’t trust her, you wouldn’t enter your credit card information.

Our work in the university is no different. Parents need to trust that we are holding up our end of the social contract, and students need to trust that we will act in ways that promote their long-term success. Faculty need to trust that the administration will support teaching and research. The federal government needs to trust that research universities are efficiently using federal dollars to produce lifesaving research, innovation and artistic production. As Johns Hopkins University president Ronald Daniels recently suggested, the research ecosystem built by the government and universities over the last 80 years thrives only in an environment of mutual trust.

Is It Reasonable to Trust Universities Less Than in the Past?

Yes.

There are good reasons to trust today’s universities less than we used to. This is what the Yale report and other commentators implicitly said. Regardless of whether we’re thinking about epistemic trust or social trust, there are good reasons for the recent trust decay. Being honest about that sets the stage for repairing that trust.

First, in terms of epistemic trust, the public’s trust in universities has been undermined by the ever-growing ideological hegemony among faculty and staff. I won’t rehearse the data here, but the American professoriate bears little resemblance to the public on a range of ideological markers. Further, there is a clear and growing domination of left-wing ideology among both faculty and staff. Many departments on elite campuses are devoid of Republicans among tenure-track faculty. Some entire disciplines are close behind.

This lack of viewpoint diversity matters for epistemic trust. For example, I am not a legal scholar, but I take a great interest in Supreme Court decisions. When I read that a decision is near unanimous, I trust that the decision was made properly. When I read that a decision was approved along ideological lines, I am much less confident. People are imperfect learners, limited in knowledge, biased in outlook and pulled in various ways by their incentives. How can I tell that the justices were reasoning in accord with the evidence rather than ideological preference? The same goes when I read news articles from outlets that feature largely conservative or liberal reporters. I take those stories with a tablespoon of salt knowing that ideological imbalance of this sort is likely to skew the reporting.

Oddly enough, my colleagues on the political left have expressed this same sentiment about recommendations of federal health experts in the last year. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture rolled out a new dietary guide that basically flipped the old food pyramid on its head, many people saw this as MAHA activism rather than a revelation of science. And when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled a publication showing that COVID vaccines reduced the likelihood of a hospital stay, online commentators openly wondered whether this was because of a flaw in the study or a political preference of the administration. The ideological capture of these institutions is a threat to epistemic trust in their work.

Universities are no different. If we want students, policymakers and the broader public to trust us to educate students well and to produce research that’s guided by evidence over ideology, we need to improve the ideological climate of our institutions. Currently, that’s not an easy case to make. Week after week, there’s evidence that we’ve gone off the ideological rails.

Second, the public’s social trust in universities has been undermined in recent years. There are almost certainly many factors driving this decline in social trust. For example, just last week, Inside Higher Ed ran articles with headlines like “The Trust Problem in College Pricing Is Real” and “Confusing College Pricing Sows Mistrust in Higher Ed.” But one of the primary drivers of distrust is the recent trend of universities shifting their mission from knowledge production to activism. Social trust is about relying on someone to do what they are supposed to do. In recent years, universities have not lived up to their end of the bargain.

Historically—as Latin mottoes all across the country attest—the university was focused on the discovery of truth and dissemination of knowledge. In a nutshell, universities were places for teaching and research. But as a quick preview of mission statements and strategic plan line items will attest, today’s universities promise to do so much more. Some make teaching and research instrumentally valuable for the real goal of making the world a “more just place.” Others focus directly on goals like social progress.

This sort of mission drift is not just found among institution-level administration. Many faculty no longer consider themselves primarily scholars. They see themselves as activists or perhaps activist-scholars who are on campus primarily to advocate for social justice issues and to partner with students who want to do the same.

Needless to say, this is not what many people thought the university was supposed to do. Hence, social trust in universities is undermined by mission drift and activism. Surely that’s part of the explanation for why trust in universities has dropped the most among Republican and independent voters.

In sum, trust is a cornerstone value of the academy. Without it, we couldn’t function as scholars, the public couldn’t rely on our expertise and the social contract between university practitioners and parents, students and taxpayers would break down. We need to earn that trust back, and recommendations like those of Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education are a good first step in that direction. They explicitly call for the university to rebuild epistemic trust by freeing speech on campus and breaking down ideological echo chambers and to rebuild social trust through steps like focusing on mission and accepting students on their merits. These things will be hard to do. Trust is easier lost than earned.