University administrators sometimes ask how their institutions can best serve democracy. For decades, many believed that their role was to serve as instruments of social change. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, especially in hiring and admissions, were one part of the tool kit. Politicized academic departments, often with the word “studies” attached to them, were another.
A new report from a committee of Yale professors takes a different view. The purpose of the university, it says quite simply, is “to preserve, create and share knowledge.” The method is academic excellence. To the extent that universities are supposed to serve democracy, it’s by becoming considerably more meritocratic.
The committee, established a year ago by Yale’s president, Maurie McInnis, was created in response to a collapse of public trust in higher education, particularly in elite private schools. It examined many reasons: skyrocketing tuition costs, bureaucratic bloat, opaque admissions standards, an ideologically monochromatic faculty, rampant grade inflation, an intellectual atmosphere of censoriousness and self-censorship.
This, for the most part, is the standard conservative indictment of modern academia. The committee’s verdict: guilty. At Yale, “registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School and the School of Management.” The percentage of undergraduates who do not feel comfortable expressing their political beliefs on campus nearly doubled between 2015 and 2025. Grades are now, effectively, meaningless: In 2022-23, 79 percent of grades given to Yale undergraduates were an A or A–, up from 10 percent in 1963.
As at Lake Wobegon, at Yale the children are all above average — including the ones who, well, aren’t.
Yale deserves great credit for commissioning the report, and McInnis greater credit for largely embracing its recommendations. Those include placing academic achievement at the center of admissions decisions and reducing preferences for legacy students, athletes and children of faculty, staff and donors; “enhancing open and critical debate on campus”; grading “like we mean it”; and creating “a civic education initiative” to compensate for the fact that “there is no single course, book, work of art or scientific experiment that every Yale student is guaranteed to explore before graduation.” If not a common core, then at least a common nub. It’s something.
But is it enough? I have my doubts.
Part of the problem is that a university that spent decades turning itself into what it is now cannot easily turn itself into something else — not least because the self-governing (and often self-dealing) structures of academic life make it difficult to foster the deep cultural changes that universities require. University leaders who try to address the problem of ideological homogenization, for instance, are rarely able to do more than establish an on-campus institute or a faculty position for a tokenized conservative view. But those efforts mainly replicate one of modern academia’s worst mistakes, which was to embrace the cause of diversity (of race, ethnicity and now viewpoint) as a substitute for truth-seeking.
What universities need aren’t more young Republicans or islands of conservative thought. What they need, in every department, are more skeptics and iconoclasts and people with a capacity to change their minds intelligently. Selecting for those virtues, particularly in faculty hiring, is a long-term task.
A second problem is the pipeline that trains academics. Among the weaker defenses of the fact that faculty nationwide lean overwhelmingly left is, as Stephen Colbert half-jokingly put it, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” An alternative view is that smart, independent-minded thinkers graduating from places like Yale these days are probably more tempted to pursue a career in private equity or tech than to devote the next several years of their lives to Ph.D. programs with dubious job prospects.
Either those programs must change or universities should look more broadly for intellectual talent. The road to wisdom cannot lie in the indentured servitude of graduate-school education, capped by an unread (and frequently unreadable) dissertation.
Finally, universities will struggle to reform and improve themselves if they can’t recover a sense of what a university is for. That’s not just a credentialing agency — their de facto current role — or even a knowledge factory, which is the Yale committee’s aspiration. It’s something altogether deeper: a place where the universe of knowledge connects; where sustained engagement across multiple disciplines, enlivened by a genuine contest of ideas, nurtures the capacity for mature independent thought; where the rigor of a difficult education, enforced by a realistic prospect of failure, puts sharp young minds on a path to originality and self-understanding.
I doubt that the Yale committee would have been convened, much less produced its excellent report, if the decline in public trust hadn’t been matched by the Supreme Court ruling effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions, and by the Trump administration’s blunderbuss assault on universities. The first helped dismantle a bureaucratic infrastructure that, in practice, undermined academic achievement in admissions and hiring; the second put the fear of God in university leaders who had been afraid to rattle a campus consensus.
It shouldn’t take blunt political pressure to get universities to reform and redeem themselves. Here’s hoping they can act before they are acted upon.
