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Last month, Yale University released a striking report acknowledging that public trust in higher education is eroding — and that universities themselves bear responsibility. The report’s authors offer a candid recognition of the depth of this crisis, citing a recent Pew Research Center poll indicating that 70% of Americans believe higher education is heading in the wrong direction.
Reports like Yale’s point to real issues: cost, transparency and questions about academic culture. But recognition is not the same as a reckoning.
The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s civics school has been controversial since early 2023, when the campus Board of Trustees called to “accelerate” its development before faculty even knew it was underway. The board’s then-chairman said on Fox News he was trying to “remedy” a lack of “right-of-center views” on campus.
The university said it selected the international law firm K&L Gates last summer to review “allegations and concerns” regarding the school. Over more than seven months, the review team analyzed hundreds of thousands of documents and interviewed dozens of people. The report is complete, reportedly at a cost of $1.2 million and running more than 400 pages. But the university is refusing to release any of it—despite calls from students, faculty and media to at least reveal some contents.
A curious feature of the recently released “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education,” which is rightly being hailed as a major statement of the academic-reform movement, is a certain gingerness when it comes to describing the shape and substance of professorial political radicalism — a significant driver of declining public faith in the sector.
True, the report names the concern that “liberal professors indoctrinate their students,” and it endorses processes to encourage “open interchange” rather than ideological conformity. But, perhaps out of a reluctance to lend aid and comfort to right-wing opponents of academic freedom, the report refrains from getting too specific about the contours of left-wing academic politicization.
A couple of months ago, we spoke with the Chronicle of Higher Education about what they are calling “the conservative hiring boom.” At the time, it seemed clear to us that there was a “vibe shift” of sorts in terms of academic norms. Standalone DEI statements were on the decline, and there were anecdotal reports of heterodox scholars being recruited for faculty positions with a goal of increasing viewpoint diversity.
In light of this, we ran a poll asking folks about their perceptions of academic job market vibes, using an informal member email survey. We collected responses from 244 people working in higher education (77% of whom are HxA members). Here’s what we found.
Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two people familiar with the initiative.
The campaign, driven by Harvard’s top brass, aims to raise several hundred million dollars to support a new cohort of professors. If successful, the funding could bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup.
