Can academia regain the public's trust?

Public confidence in higher education has hit its “lowest level ever.” Only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education,” down from 57 percent in 2015.

Majorities of Democrats and Republicans believe higher education is heading in the wrong direction. The decline is sharpest among Republicans, with only 31 percent of them thinking colleges and universities have a positive impact on the nation, down from 58 percent in 2010.

Topping the list of reasons for this decline are perceptions that colleges and universities indoctrinate students in left-wing ideologies while failing to teach workplace skills.

It is worth placing this loss of trust in context. Americans’ trust in the federal government “to do the right thing,” which reached 70 percent in the late 1950s, now stands at 22 percent. Seventy percent view Congress unfavorably, and 85 percent claim elected officials don’t care “what people like them think.” Public approval of the Supreme Court is near a record low at 47 percent. Only 42 percent of Republicans trust the news media. Only 57 percent of Americans think science “has had a mostly positive effect on society.”

Misery loves company, but “historic lows” in trust in national institutions offers little consolation to colleges and universities. With first-year enrollment down 5 percent and a “demographic cliff” approaching, many of them are struggling financially.

Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump wants to reclaim colleges and universities from “Marxist maniacs.” JD Vance has called professors "the enemy" and proposed increasing the endowment earnings tax imposed on wealthy universities from 1.4 percent to 35 percent.

Officeholders at the federal and state level have already restricted or are seeking to restrict the teaching of “divisive” concepts, shutter campus diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, limit tenure, mandate ideological diversity, privatize student loans, stifle student protests, ban controversial books, weaponize accreditation, bar transgender athletes from women’s sports, scrap student debt forgiveness plans, and eliminate the Department of Education.

Restoring public trust in higher education would go a long way toward addressing these challenges. In a new book, “Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do About Them,” Anthony Laden, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggests a path forward.

Laden notes that Americans disagree not only about facts and policies, but also about “what sources of information can be trusted” and “what makes a source of information trustworthy in the first place.”

College-educated people tend to trust mainstream media, government reports, and scientific and academic sources whose facts, interpretations, and conclusions are based on disciplinary expertise and generally accepted rules of evidence.

Aware of ways in which pedigreed experts sometimes “dismiss [their] lived experience,” those without college educations may value “situated knowledge and understanding” developed “on the basis of long acquaintance with and participation in various social practices.” They may trust community members and religious authorities and distrust scientific information “precisely because it is scientific.”

Although he is convinced that the “broadly scientific” approach” to knowledge is “arguably the great intellectual contribution of the modern university,” Laden warns it can lead to groupthink and policies that distribute harms and benefits unequally. Recent examples, we would note, include trade policies that hollowed out working-class communities and pandemic regulations that kept children out of school longer than necessary.

And so, even as the scientific approach positions students “for careers and lives ... in the elite sectors of society,” it imposes significant social costs on students from religious, rural, or conservative backgrounds by distancing them from the values and cultural assumptions of their families and home communities. Family members, friends, and community leaders, in turn, may “conclude that what is happening must be the result of indoctrination, not education.” This insight helps explain claims that colleges and universities indoctrinate their students, even though multiple studies suggest otherwise.

It’s hard to know how much higher education fosters the alienation Laden describes. Most students’ political and religious views change relatively little in college, and to the extent they are open to change, fellow undergraduates tend to be more influential than professors. Nor is there much evidence beyond anecdotes to demonstrate that college impairs students’ relationships with their communities. 

We commend Laden for reminding administrators and professors to avoid dogmatism, groupthink, information silos and echo chambers, consider challenges based on “long experience” as well as “random-controlled trials,” and teach students to think charitably, flexibly and with intellectual humility. We agree with him, moreover, that colleges create and require vulnerability and that they can keep students safe without coddling them. 

All that said, Laden’s thesis — that colleges should place “trust and the building of trust, rather than beliefs, values, and their formation, at the center of [their] picture of education” — is, for us, a bridge too far. In our view, the fundamental goal of education is to shape students’ beliefs regarding what and how to learn and help them understand and identify legitimate grounds on which to question “settled truth.” 

We think it unwise and maybe even counter-productive to enlist professors in preserving or restoring students’ preexisting networks of trust. His suggestion, for example, that professors assist parents and their communities “with the problems they wish to identify and to solve” would in our judgment divert faculty from their core responsibilities.

Laden emphasizes that the broadly scientific approach is essential to the pursuit of knowledge, and that it necessarily entails privileging some beliefs and ways of knowing over others. He acknowledges that biology professors, for example, should not treat religious texts as a valid way to understand evolution. But he muddies the waters by urging colleges to build “an open-minded informational trust network for students instead of a broadly scientific one.”

In our highly polarized society, with its siloed sources of “information” and opinion, attitudes toward expertise and institutions are largely driven by forces outside educators’ control. Americans, after all, disagree about basic principles and precepts. What constitutes a “settled truth” and how should it be presented? Should we trust experts? What is the relationship between information and interpretation, critical thinking and indoctrination? Should “divisive concepts” be excluded from required reading, classroom presentations and discussions?

They disagree as well about how to rebuild trust in higher education. Ensuring representation of a wide range of views on campus, promoting a culture of civil discourse, and treating all students with respect will help. But higher education risks losing everyone’s trust if it fails to stay true to its “broadly scientific” mission.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is president emeritus of Hamilton College.