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Thirty-eight percent of Americans currently report having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to this year’s Gallup poll, down from 42% last year and just two points above the record lows of 36% recorded in 2023 and 2024. Last year’s uptick, it turns out, was not the start of a recovery so much as a blip.
The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more contested.
The recent report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has renewed the debate over the internal politicization of academe. As one of its authors (speaking only for myself), I find the report relatively tepid.
Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction.
Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
