Yale University’s Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education is aserious and welcome act of institutional self-scrutiny. It names real concerns: rising costs, opaque admissions, grade inflation, bureaucratic growth, and public skepticism about the university’s purpose. Its call to recommit to the creation and dissemination of knowledge is important.
But it is also incomplete.
Because what we are living through is not simply a crisis of trust in higher education. It is a restructuring of higher education itself.
When elite institutions diagnose declining public confidence, they tend to look inward—toward institutional practices, campus climate, and internal reform. These matter. But from the vantage point of Texas, where policy is rapidly reshaping universities, the problem is not only perception. It is power.
To its credit, the Yale report defends free speech and academic freedom. But it stops short of centering what is fundamentally at stake: the university’s role in a democracy. Universities do not exist merely to produce credentials or workforce skills. At their best, they protect society’s capacity to ask difficult questions, examine power, and cultivate the habits of mind necessary for democratic life.
And it is precisely this function that is under threat.
Today’s attacks on higher education are not simply expressions of public distrust. They are part of a coordinated political project to reshape what universities are, what they do, and who they serve.
This is not new. Since Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, universities have been understood by corporate and political actors as key sites in the struggle over ideas and public power. While not meant for circulation at the time, it suggested a broad, organized effort to shape public discourse,
Seen in this light, calls for institutional reform—however well-intentioned—cannot fully address the moment we are in.
Because the terrain has already shifted.
Senate Bill 17 (2023), under the banner of neutrality, dismantles diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across public universities—removing not only offices, but the infrastructures that made institutions more accessible and accountable to historically marginalized communities. Senate Bill 37 (2025) goes further, weakening faculty governance and shifting authority to politically appointed boards, inserting new oversight into curriculum, hiring, and programmatic decisions.
Taken together, these policies do more than reform universities. They redefine them.
They narrow what can be taught. They reshape who has authority. They recalibrate what counts as legitimate knowledge.
This is the problem.
The Yale report gestures toward declining trust but largely avoids the political and economic forces driving these transformations—decades of public disinvestment, the rise of market logics, and, increasingly, the direct intervention of the state in regulating knowledge. What remains is a technocratic conversation about institutional repair.
But repair assumes stability.
In Texas, there is no stable baseline to repair.
“Free speech” here is not an abstract principle; it is a contested policy site. Faculty report self-censoring—not because of student protest or intellectual disagreement, but because of vague directives on “controversial topics,” the chilling effects of SB 17, and the structural reordering introduced by SB 37. Programs such as Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies—longstanding sites of scholarly inquiry—find themselves weakened, consolidated, or quietly marginalized.
This is what I and others describe as anticipatory compliance and shadow censorship: institutions narrowing themselves in advance of enforcement, reshaping academic life without the need for explicit bans.
None of this can be understood if distrust is treated as a matter of perception alone.
Nor can it be understood without acknowledging the racialized dimensions of this moment. When claims of “bias” are mobilized to target fields that examine race, inequality, and power, this is not a neutral call for balance. It is a struggle over whose knowledge counts—and whose histories are allowed to be told.
History offers a warning.
The Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research was forced into exile after the rise of Nazism (Jay, 1973; Wiggershaus, 1995). Its scholars understood that authoritarianism does not begin with book burning alone. It begins with delegitimizing critical inquiry, demonizing intellectuals, and disciplining institutions that produce inconvenient knowledge.
The echo today is not identical. But it is unmistakable.
Across states like Texas and Florida, we see efforts to dismantle DEI, restrict curriculum, weaken faculty governance, and recode academic freedom as ideological capture. These are not isolated developments. They are part of a broader campaign to remake higher education into a more compliant institution—less critical, less democratic, less public.
So yes, universities should reflect on how they have contributed to public distrust.
But that is not enough.
Because the more urgent question is whether we are willing to confront the restructuring already underway.
If higher education is to remain a democratic institution, it must defend more than its reputation. It must defend its purpose.
That means protecting academic freedom not just in principle, but in practice. It means sustaining shared governance as more than a symbolic ideal. It means refusing policies that narrow inquiry, erase histories, or subordinate knowledge to political agendas.
The crisis, in other words, is not simply that higher education is misunderstood.
It is that it is being remade.
And the question before us is not how to restore trust.
It is whether we are willing to defend the university as a democratic public good—before it is fundamentally transformed into something else.
References
Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Little, Brown.
Powell, L. F., Jr. (1971, August 23). Attack on American free enterprise system [Memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., U.S. Chamber of Commerce]. (Powell Memo)
Stewart, K. (2025). Money, Lies, and God. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Wallnau, L., & Johnson, B. (2013). Invading Babylon: The 7 mountain mandate. Destiny Image Publishers
Wiggershaus, R. (1995). The Frankfurt School: Its history, theories, and political significance (M. Robertson, Trans.). MIT Press.
Yale University. (2026). Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Yale University.
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