A Tale of Two Reports

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 2, 2026 | George Leef

[karpov]

A point that has generated much discussion is the decline in confidence in and support for higher education. Over the last ten years or so, the percentage of Americans who say they have a high degree of confidence in our colleges and universities has fallen, while the percentage who say they’re skeptical about the value of higher education has risen sharply.

Many in the higher education establishment have dismissed this as having no importance—merely the result of increasingly vicious right-wing polemics aimed at one of the nation’s great engines of “progressive” influence, they say. Nothing to be concerned about.

Some academic leaders, however, have decided to take this matter seriously. One is Yale’s president Maurie McInnis, who, in 2025, convened a faculty Committee on Trust in Higher Education to study the question. Its report was released in April and acknowledges that our higher education has created a real problem by allowing ideology to shove aside fairness and objectivity. It notes that “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

The report recommends that the university work to enhance open debate on campus. One way to do that is for each department to critically assess “the openness of its hiring and admissions practices to dissenting or underrepresented traditions.” Those will be unwelcome words for the many on Yale’s faculty who relish their ideological activism and believe that dissenting voices are being kept out for good reason.

Will Yale follow through on this excellent idea, or will it die quietly, as professors who like the status quo just fine continue to exclude dissidents from the faculty?

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: college; yale

[ClearCase_guy]

I believe it’s Gresham’s Law — “Bad money drives out good”.

Too many bad people in education. It is no longer an environment in which any good people can survive. Good people do not want to enter. Good people have no interest in the field. There’s really no fixing it.

[ComputerGuy]

People who work in ‘higher education’ are the last ones who should speak on the subject. An unusual circumstance made necessary by the stratospheric levels of stupidity prevalent in their field.

[spintreebob]

“Will Yale follow through?”

God and Man at Yale started this in 1951. We have (n’t) come a long way baby.

[Bookshelf]

Finally, a lifting of the Velvet Curtain. It is decades overdue. Bookshelf, Ph.D.

[EnderWiggin1970]

Two things need to happen, because the lunatic asylums of academia and their inmates are not going to reform themselves more than superficially.

1. Parents need to stop pushing their kids to go to the asylums, instead finding sane alternatives for higher learning, whether it be the rare classical schools like Hillsdale, new forms of online education, mentoring programs, job certification programs, professional society accreditations, etc.

2. The flow of money to the asylums needs to be cut off. Stopping the flow of children is only part of the answer. The rest is the flow of federal and state tax revenues to "education." At the Federal level this is plainly a violation of the 10th amendment, but pressure also needs to be applied at the state level, as well as pressuring businesses to be sensible and support real education, not the farcical asylums.

[TTFX]

Bowdoin College requires students to take a class about equity.

https://share.google/aimode/CHPjaCrvqi8Awz4Tj

Zohran Mamdani attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies.

[MileHi]

At the Federal level this is plainly a violation of the 10th amendment,

How so?