In the Spring of 2026, Yale answered the call from the Right. Over the course of twelve months, a committee of faculty at the university examined the problem of declining trust in higher education at the request of the university’s president. On April 10, the report was made available to the public, outlining twenty recommendations for Yale’s administration and higher education institutions across the nation. The report’s veiled shunning of DEI, ignorance in the face of a historical push towards anti-intellectualism, and failure to recognize the Right’s ridiculing of truth renders most of its advocacy for trust-fostering practices merely panders to the darkest forces of our current political moment.
As the new academic year is in full swing, with universities being presented their first opportunity to take actionable steps towards implementing the report’s recommendations, one is left wondering how much further higher education can be led astray before it loses its way entirely.
The report begins by stating: “Universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge.” Immediately after the report’s publication, the university altered its mission statement to match this opening line verbatim. Adopted in 2016, Yale’s previous mission statement committed the university to “improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice.” The new statement is a convenient and subtle redefinition indicative of the changes witnessed in the nation’s character since 2016. It ultimately denies the university’s essential relationship to society outside of academia—encouraging a retreat into a noninterfering silo that assumes no responsibility to apply its knowledge for the betterment of society.
To gesture at mobilizing knowledge to promote societal progress would be to betray the conservatives who have since heralded the report as a feat. In their continued battle against diversity, equity, and inclusion, a report that signals towards blind meritocracy is a wartime love letter to those who seek to disqualify the credentials of modern, diverse graduate classes. The report specifically states that universities, in recent years, have been “expected to be all things to all people,” which is to say “meritocratic but equitable” and this “diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust”. Framing meritocracy and equity as mutually exclusive and at contentious odds with one another is to uncritically accept an ideological talking point with no factual basis.
This “make it great again” refrain is all but directly stated in the report. To reestablish ourselves as preeminent, meritocratic institutions, it argues, we must go back to the old—inequitable—ways of testing.
The meritocratic policy advocated for in the report is a minimum SAT score and/or a university entrance exam. A shift like this would deny the many other ways students show up and contribute to a student body—such as through the arts, service, or athletics. Notably, it would also deny the reality that merit-based admissions—rather than holistic review—have long privileged white, wealthy students in every metric taken. Not because they’re smarter, but because the distribution of resources falls in their favor. Advocating for blind meritocracy is not an attempt at fairness or a way to garner trust: It is a peddling to the dominant mantra of the Right that DEI has destroyed standards of admissions by instantiating holistic evaluation processes.
By arguing that meritocracy has been sacrificed in equity’s name, the report implies that the Left has paved this path to infiltrate institutions of higher education. Equitable policies—such as affirmative action—result in higher numbers of first-generation, low-income students and/or those from marginalized communities being admitted to universities. Research shows that these cohorts tend to lean Left.
Surprisingly, however, not all diversity is offensive to the Right, only the forms it takes that benefit more than one demographic. Hence the new chorus of conservatives vying for what they term “viewpoint diversity.”
It is true that without political diversity, universities cannot exist. We cannot be uncritical of ourselves or our colleagues if we want forward momentum and progress. Homogeneity produces intellectual nullity and protects echo chambers, neither of which help the country progress. Ironically, it is grief over a shift away from homogeneity that is propelling the “viewpoint diversity” movement forward. By advocating for ideological hiring quotas and political litmus tests on job applicants, it is committing the very sins it falsely accuses DEI of, and does so in the name of the meritocracy.
The movement is based on irrational leaps and the Yale report sustains its somersaults. Rather than affirming complexity, the report aims to simplify context—which is to say, it removes critical information entirely. The report states that “registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans among faculty nationwide by a margin of about 10 to 1.”
Staging the make-up of an institution of higher education according to a political binary of Democrat versus Republican is insufficient. Academia thrives upon intense specialization. Does all the complexity of opinions held by an attorney specialized in commercial contract law and an environmental scientist specialized in paleooceanography get submerged beneath a single tick in the same box in the voting booth? Differences of that magnitude don’t produce nullity. Moreover, at a university like Columbia, my alma mater, where approximately 40% of the scholarly body is international, their political affiliation goes unaccounted for leading to a striking misrepresentation of reality.
This still isn’t the whole picture though. The real problem originates from within the conservative camp itself. Putting it simply, higher education is no longer a ubiquitously held Republican value. Education—in prioritizing critical thinking, freedom of expression, and the development of an individual’s character towards self-governance—threatens MAGA’s agenda. In devaluing education, the Right is admitting that it recognizes education’s power to liberate and it is forcing society to turn away. DEI is just the easy scapegoat.
At Columbia, the Right mandated—with the threat of slashing massive amounts of funding if we did not comply—the introduction of draconian task forces monitoring classroom instruction and the effective dismantling of departments by placing them under receivership, instituting an existential crisis. Moreover, the highest levels of the government have accused universities of being “the enemy” and justifying “aggressively attacking” them on that basis.
All of these attacks have led to a fundamental shift in the Right’s relationship to higher education, delegitimizing both graduates and the knowledge produced by them. The consequence has been a severe diminishment of trust in higher education, based on the pretense that the expertise produced at elite institutions like Yale or Columbia—idealized forms of what higher education should be—is really “knowledge” created by and for liberals, in order to advance their liberal democratic agenda. The burden of blame does not therefore fall on DEI. Instead, it rests with those who have a mindset resistant to change and to proving oneself as capable according to new, more expansive rules. The privilege of being able to advocate for a return to the past, delegitimizes the future.
Questioning the validity of higher education, and of the facts it produces through methodical research has left us in a crisis of truth. In his manipulation of narratives and negation of facts, Trump was then, and is now, “a challenge to the university itself.” Believable falsehoods got him elected. But the pursuit of truth is the fundamental mission of any university. Without it, the preservation, creation and sharing of knowledge—the Yale project—is futile.
Understandably, truth is a tricky concept to pin down. It can be scientific or poetic, static or dynamic, representational or performative. But it does exist—a fact that President Trump would rather deny. In 2020, President Emeritus of Macalester College, Brian Rosenberg, called Trump an “epistemological hand grenade”. That is why, in my view, one cannot be pro-Trump and pro-higher education. His attacks supersede political debate. Trump, as chief representative of the Right, has consistently strove to break the very foundations that allow for debate. If we have no common set of facts, no respect for new information unless it reinforces our worldview then how can we ever hope to advance?
So, when we talk about waning trust in higher education, it is important to distinguish between those who do not trust truth, and those who believe that the process towards truth or an approximation of it based on evidence, could be reformed.
In part, this desertion of truth, and an inability to defend against Trump, is a product of a governance system that privileges financial viability over academic freedom. The Yale Report takes significant note of university governance in pointing to the hierarchical delegation of responsibilities that exists at the highest institutional levels: “The president and trustees are the university’s fiduciaries. They have wide discretion over managerial and budgetary matters. The faculty govern academic matters such as curricula and tenure standards.”
If we have been taught one thing over the course of the last three years, it is that managerial, budgetary, and academic matters are inseparable. With profit-oriented actors at the helm, charged with ensuring financial viability, education became one priority among others, increasingly positioned in tension with the pursuit of wealth maximization, not equity. It also became clear that financial investments are speech acts. They delimit the scope of discussion allowed in classrooms. They dictate which departments may be drowned by a specific political current. In our naivety, we believed that universities could be governed in such a strictly delineated manner, separating finance from the academe. This presumption has led to failures that ultimately have diminished trust both within and beyond the institutions themselves. And it is from here that we must reexamine ourselves first.
As Jacques Derrida notes in his warnings on the potential university that pursues the truth with condition, “I leave you to imagine the consequences. Take your time but be quick about it because you do not know what awaits you.”
