We Don’t Need ‘Trust.’ We Need Ambivalence.

In April, Yale University President Maurie McInnis convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which would “undertake a process of reckoning and reflection … to better understand public perception and envision ways of strengthening trust.” Per an early-September report in the Yale Daily News, the Trust Committee had spent its summer “conducting background research and holding preliminary conversations,” but found itself unsure of what to do next.

The board of the Buckley Institute petitioned for Lauren Noble (YC ‘11), Executive Director of the Buckley Institute, to be added in June. Noble suggested to the Yale Daily News that the faculty-only body might have trouble seeing out of its ideological bubble. To understand public distrust, it would need “an outsider’s vantage point,” she said. 

“Ivy League faculty life,” wrote the Buckley Institute’s Board of Directors, “is dramatically different from that of the average American.”

I was raised in a college town by a professor and a doctor at a university hospital. I’ve been here on campus for only a month, and even I can tell you, with the utmost confidence, that life at Yale indeed is very far from the norm. This is a weird place, vastly unlike most of the rest of the country.

To be sure, we’re just as human as Bob Cobb of Springfield, Illinois. We all eat and drink and do our laundry—although, our food is prepared for us by a team of professional chefs. And if the laundry becomes too much of a headache, well, we can hire that out too. Really, we Yalies, and our professors too, get up in the mornings and get out of our beds and just start thinking about stuff. We think and we read, and sometimes we even write or talk about what we’ve been reading or thinking about. And that’s all we do, all day, all week, endlessly, forever.

Now, I’d be the last guy to say that this isn’t a fun way to live—but for most of us, it won’t go on forever. In no time at all, we’ll be looking back on our bright college years fondly, appreciating how they taught us to think and read and write and talk well, and then going off to our real jobs where we’ll presumably do real things with real spreadsheets in the real world.

For most of the history of higher education in America, everyone understood this was the point: To give a select few exceptionally clever kids a shot at living a life of the academic, the abstract, the noumenal—what it might be fitting to call the Life of the Mind—knowing all would benefit to some extent, but expecting most to leave the Ivory Tower behind. The Life of the Mind was decidedly not its antithesis, Real Life, and no one expected it to be. It involved education in all sorts of wacky things—readings in Plato, Virgil, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault, or exercises in analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrizations of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds (bozhe moi!)—which were all abandoned to hazy memory once students left campus for their Real Lives.

Sure, some of the best of the best in the humanities went deeper and wackier into their favorite wacky things, and got jobs teaching them to the next generation—but everyone else moved on. They got jobs at banks and at consultancies, Marx and Foucault gathering dust together on their bookshelves.

And then something changed.

Hiring managers at the banks and consultancies noticed that people with elite college degrees, the ones who’d lived a few years of the Life of the Mind, were often very good at their jobs. And after a 1971 Supreme Court ruling (and decades of legislation and caselaw) which all but outlawed the conduct of pre-employment competency testing, higher-education credentials were all they had to rely on. College enrollment skyrocketed through the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, as a post-secondary degree became an increasingly ubiquitous prerequisite for well-paid work.

Under the new credentialist regime, more and more Americans became obsessed with the university. Increasingly, the college experience has become the anchor-point of middle-and-upper-class America’s personal and professional interactions. We meet lifelong friends and spouses on campus, vie for internships and job opportunities, found startups, and coffee-chat with high-powered alumni. The firewall between campus life—the Life of the Mind—and Real Life has crumbled away.

While Real Life was sneaking its way onto campus, the Life of the Mind was sneaking its way off. Elite grads working in elite corporate HR departments and elite publications and elite advocacy groups began taking very seriously all the Foucauldian ideas from their wackiest philosophy classes. Those who hadn’t gone to college or hadn’t taken the wacky classes, or simply had a good enough head on their shoulders to recognize that the ideas were weird, said, “Hm. This seems bad.”

And they soon tracked the bad back to campus and they looked around and they said, “Whoa! What on earth has been going on here? Why have you been teaching everyone all this wacky stuff?”

This question had been asked of American universities before. When William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale was published in 1951, there was a real uproar: The country’s premier educational institutions were in thrall to communists! Atheistic collectivism had run amok on campus, and it was the future-elites of the country getting brainwashed.

A brief panic ensued, but after Yale released a number of statements along the lines of “Nope, no communists here, it’s all good,” and “Buckley is a Catholic, by the way, really just the Pope’s puppet,” national attention turned elsewhere. No one had ever been forced to attend a mandatory workplace training from a Yale-educated communist, everyone’s Real Life went on as normal, and so the public lost interest.

Mega-donor Paul Mellon sent Yale a five-million-dollar gift, and campus Life of the Mind went on just as communistically as before.

A similar, though smaller, scandal burst out as recently as the 2008 presidential election.

Then, it emerged that Bill Ayers, co-founder of Weatherman, a radical left-wing domestic terror group, had collaborated on various political projects with Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, during his college years in Chicago. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who co-founded Weatherman with him), had each been welcomed into the academic elite despite planning dozens of bombings throughout the 1970s.

But what today surely would’ve resulted in an uproar against the University of Illinois at Chicago for hiring Ayers—or perhaps even a broader reckoning with radical leftist influence on campus—was then made only into an attack ad by John McCain’s campaign.

Ayers, Obama, and the media all downplayed the connection, McCain lost, and the university was spared. Bill Ayers was a wacko, sure—but he wasn’t trying to peddle his wackiness in the mainstream. He declined to have the political spotlight shone on him, and the public eventually stopped paying attention.

Ayers and Dohrn kept their professorships, and confidence in academia quickly returned to healthy levels.

Why haven’t today’s academics been so lucky?

Well, instead of receding from Real Life, they forced their wackiness into the zeitgeist. Normal Americans were exposed, over and over and over again, to the bizarre ideas and arguments that make up the Life of the Mind. They saw behind the curtain, and they couldn’t move on and forget about it because a bunch of academics kept popping out in front of the curtain yelling, “Hey, now come check this out!”

It wasn’t the public’s trust which was eroded—it was their ignorance of what went on here.

That ignorance is what saved Yale in the ‘50s, and Ayers in 2008. It turned scandal and outrage into ambivalence and tolerance. Americans put up with academics so long as they adhered to an implicit agreement: You can do what you want in the Ivory Tower, but don’t let it screw with my Real Life!

So what is there for President McInnis’ committee to do? If the American people preferred literal terrorists to the professors and administrators we’ve got now, how can we possibly save Yale from their wrath?

Well, it’s time to again hold up our end of the bargain. To keep the Life of the Mind far, far away from Real Life. To let the public slip back into peaceful ambivalence toward academia.

Whether the Committee on Trust understands this to be its mission is unclear—though its faculty-only constitution is a worrying sign. To faculty, the Life of the Mind and Real Life are quite indistinguishable. They’ll have a hard time coming to the conclusion that their influence and prominence ought to be reduced, that the academy’s role in society ought to shrink.

And I sympathize with their hesitancy! I love Yale so far, the Life of the Mind is super fun, and there’s a part of me which hopes I can be one of the lucky few who get to live it forever. But I also want to have a real impact on the real world—I want to have both! And of course the faculty do, too.

History suggests that this can’t end well. The Life of the Mind, which the faculty live and which they work so hard to create for their students, can only continue to exist if it recedes almost entirely from public view. We must rebuild the firewall, and build it firm.