In April 2025, Yale President Maurie McInnis formed the Committee on Trust in Higher Education with the charge of examining the problem of declining trust in higher education. The committee submitted its report on April 10, 2026. Although the report rightly focuses on specific actions that Yale itself can take, the report has wide implications for all of higher education.

Here are the top 10 unanimous recommendations of the Yale committee, paraphrased to emphasize implications for all universities:

1. Take responsibility: Critically examine our own institutions.
2. Focus on the mission: “Create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”
3. Protect free speech: Affirm rights of invited speakers and of students, faculty, and community members.
4. Support academic freedom: Recognize that academic freedom goes beyond free speech to “the rights and responsibilities of faculty to conduct research, teach classes, engage in campus discussion, and speak as public citizens without fear of reprisal from university or government.”
5. Make higher education affordable: Make the financial aid system “more comprehensible, predictable, and fair.” Do something about the crushing debt taken on by graduate students in all fields.
6. Reform undergraduate admissions: “Embrace a standard of candor: It [the university] should only use criteria for admission that it is willing to describe publicly and defend openly. The top priority in admission decisions should be academic achievement.”
7. Open minds: Enhance open and critical debate. Strive toward what John Stuart Mill calls “the collision of adverse opinions.” “Great teaching and scholarship,” the report says, “require contestation.”
8. Deliver educational value: Reaffirm the “commitment to the undergraduate liberal arts and work actively to help students translate a liberal arts education into a successful professional and civic life.
9. Open the gates: Think more creatively about how to make “its research and resources, including its teaching, available to a wider community.
10. Re-center the classroom: Reinvigorate teaching “to make the classroom experience more rigorous and rewarding, with the goal of cultivating sustained attention, intellectual curiosity, and disciplined habits of mind.”

In summary, Yale calls for self-examination; transparency in policies covering admission and financial aid, a renewed emphasis on undergraduate liberal arts education leading to fulfillment in life and career, greater emphasis on teaching, and a commitment to core values of free speech, academic freedom, open inquiry, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

After the report came out last week, The New York Times ran a click-bait headline, “Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems.”

This thought-provoking report deserves better than that. Yes, it focuses on several issues pertinent to Yale itself and to its Ivy League counterparts like the University of Pennsylvania. And, yes, resentment of the Ivy League as elitist and privileged does explain much of the distrust of higher education.

But highly selective and highly visible universities can be role models for all colleges and universities to engage seriously in the Yale report’s number one recommendation: taking responsibility for self-examination.

I’ve written frequently about the Trump administration’s war on higher education’s values and practices. The administration’s weapons of choice are hand grenades, hack saws, and sledge hammers. Let there be blood! It’s understandable that under these attacks including threats to destroy scientific research and to pursue draconian legal cases, colleges and universities might retreat into triage or surrender. The Yale report demonstrates a first step toward a responsible response to criticism — self-examination leading to paradigmatic change.

Penn, too, has undertaken the struggle of self-examination. Its newly published draft guidelines on “open expression,” the first substantive change in the permanent guidelines since 1989, have met with harsh criticism. University officials rightfully plan to listen to feedback and to reconsider the guidelines before presentation to the University Council in September and to the university president for review.

What’s essential is self-criticism and open dialogue. Looking in the mirror rather than shielding one’s eyes.

Recommendations in the Yale Report pertinent to all colleges and universities

Self-examination

Now is the time for university communities — faculty, administration, staff, and students — to take a hard look at curriculum, admission, retention, free-speech policies, reward systems — everything. Supposedly institutions do this regularly for accreditation reviews and other purposes. As a university president, I’ve overseen many of these reviews. But I have to confess that under normal circumstances the tendency is to justify, even celebrate, the status quo. Most colleges and universities make incremental improvements, but 2026 is a time to rethink everything.

Transparency in policies covering admission and financial aid

Because of sizable endowments, Yale and Penn have the luxury of being crystal clear on financial aid. Tuition is free — and everyone understands free — for families that make up to $120,000 per year. But what about families that make $130,000? Other less well-endowed colleges and universities offer greater complexity in financial aid policies. Private universities publish a sticker price and then dramatically discount. How? For whom? University web pages are difficult to interpret. For starters, universities and colleges should be better online communicators. It’s also essential that financial aid officers serve as counselors to every student or parent making an inquiry. That means investing resources in increased training of the financial aid staff and offering their services even to those who have not yet applied.

The admissions process for highly selective universities like Yale and Penn are murky and should be clarified, but all institutions could do better in assisting students in how to get in. What does open admissions really mean? What do moderately selective colleges really look for? Again the highly educated people running colleges and universities should be better communicators.

Renewed emphasis — everywhere — on undergraduate liberal arts education leading to fulfillment in life and career

Everywhere from Penn to the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) higher education must eliminate the snobbism practiced openly and covertly, especially by humanities professors. (I’m one, so I should know!) My article, “Marry the Liberal Arts to Education in Trades, Crafts and Entrepreneurship” expresses an idea that would explode the existing paradigm promoting the purity of the liberal arts.

Humanities professors should substitute civic engagement for navel gazing. I’m proud of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the long established organization for professors of English and foreign language, for joining lawsuits protesting funding cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). But what about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), which used to be my intellectual home? When will my English composition colleagues turn attention to promoting clear public communication and protecting the First Amendment?

Greater emphasis on teaching

If Yale is serious about this one, they could lead the way. Parents and students have a right to expect that they are paying for excellent teaching. At many colleges and universities overworked and underpaid part-time instructors teach first-year courses — the most crucial gateways to new intellectual experiences.

Higher education has created a social structure where teaching is undervalued and research productivity is the coin of the realm. Both teaching and research are important. Research and teaching should not be dichotomized. Great teachers draw on up-to-date research in their fields. Otherwise they would be teaching yesterday’s news. So I’m not calling for a special corps of teachers-only at prestigious universities.

In “Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror,” Penn professor Jonathan Zimmerman writes, “Every department that produces new faculty members should have a set of required courses devoted to the instruction of the discipline. And every professor’s teaching — like their research — should be judged by their peers … I have taught at Penn for nine years, and nobody has observed me in the classroom. I could be doing anything — or nothing.” If Penn and Yale rethought the value, including monetary value they place on teaching, other colleges and universities would be motivated to follow.

Commitment to core values of free speech, academic freedom, open inquiry, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

As reforms move forward, free speech and open inquiry define the hill we have to die on — or prevail in its protection.

And higher education must learn to do this together. The norm has been for universities and colleges to compete with each other, when much more can be gained through cooperation. Now that we are under attack we need an unprecedented shift to unity. At a recent forum sponsored by New America, Lee Bollinger, president emeritus of Columbia University and former president of the University of Michigan, called for a NATO for universities. “When one university is attacked, everyone commits to coming to their defense.” That would mean Penn protesting TRIO cuts at CCP, and CCP defending research grants at Penn.

Individual universities working alone cannot effectively protect higher education’s core mission. And that mission is both enduring and open to contemporary reflection. Yale President Maurie McInnis writes eloquently on this point in a public letter introducing the Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education:

To me, universities have always been a great experiment, a question of what happens when we let curiosity run free, when we pursue new ideas and bold innovations unfettered by the limitations of current human understanding. Over the past three centuries, Yale’s answers to this question have strengthened our country and changed the world: research that has saved lives; art and literature that have explored the human condition in all its contradictions and complexity; historical inquiry that has illuminated our past and informed our future.

While asserting these core values, President McInnis affirms that these “contributions to humanity” do not “exempt us from public accountability and criticism.”

I call upon universities and colleges to be open to public accountability and criticism, transforming this moment of attack into a time for creativity and reform.

Elaine Maimon, Ph.D., is the author of Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation. Her long career in higher education has encompassed top executive positions at Governors State University (IL), University of Alaska Anchorage, and Arizona State University West Campus, as well as distinction as a scholar in rhetoric/composition. Her co-authored book, Writing in the Arts and Sciences, has been designated as a landmark text. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.

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