America’s colleges and universities are facing a crisis of legitimacy, and Yale University just issued one of the most candid institutional diagnoses yet of how they got here—and what it will take to climb out.
A faculty committee convened by Yale president Maurie McInnis released a sweeping report Wednesday on the collapse of public confidence in higher education, offering a blunt assessment of the sector’s failures on cost, admissions, free speech, and governance. The findings, a year in the making, represent one of the most self-critical examinations any elite university has publicly undertaken. The report arrives as Yale and its Ivy League peers are under pressure from multiple directions—not just a skeptical public, but a federal government that has used funding as a direct lever against campus autonomy.
