The Committee on Trust in Higher Education Is Losing the Plot

On Tuesday, the Committee on Trust in Higher Education held an event with Vanita Gupta (YC ‘96), a civil rights lawyer and former associate attorney general. She was to speak on “The Future of Higher Education.”

Something like two dozen Yale community members had braved the night’s freezing rain, and we scattered ourselves sparsely around the classroom in Harkness Hall. Several audience members were taking notes—for the sake of journalism and graduate thesis research, I would learn—and several others were themselves on the Committee.

In face of the poor turnout, I found myself questioning the purpose of the Trust Committee. The most cynical part of my mind suggested it might exist only so President Maurie McInnis can point to that existence if Yale is ever seriously threatened by the federal government and say, “See? We’re taking this very seriously!” After all, the Committee seems to know already how Yale can regain the public trust: “universities must redouble commitments to academic freedom and free speech,” reads its website.

Even more, these aims have been the university’s stated aims since 1975, when Yale adopted the “Report of the Committee on Free Expression at Yale” (more commonly known as the “Woodward Report”). It suggested that the university’s overriding commitment was “to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching,” and that this meant it must “ensure within it the fullest degree of intellectual freedom.”

So what could there be left for the Trust Committee to do? I suppose all that remains is to figure out implementation. From its Conversation Series, then—and from its conversation with Vanita Gupta—I expected to get some kind of a clear and straightforward gameplan. Some diagnosis of what led us astray of the Woodward Report’s ideals, and what might now lead us back to them.

I was to be sorely disappointed.

Vanita Gupta introduced herself as an “institutionalist,” as someone with an inside view of how elite institutions gain or lose the public’s trust. And she insisted, over and over again, that “institutions are people.” That declining trust in American institutions was a result of declining trust in the leaders of those institutions.

She quickly parlayed that insight into a critique of the Trump administration—of its chaotic and unprincipled approach to the law in particular. Referencing its several extortionary investigations into American universities, Gupta said she was “deeply troubled by … the ways in which civil rights laws are being perverted and contorted.”

Only… hang on. I’m fairly sure the whole “precipitous decline in public trust” thing had been going on even sometime before Trump’s latest accession to the Oval Office. Yes, in fact, it was between 2015 and 2024 that the proportion of Americans with very little or no trust in higher education more than tripled from 10 to 32 percent. Actually, in the year since, that number has receded somewhat—it’s back down to 23 percent.

So perhaps we should reconsider which institutions—that is, which people and which leaders—are to blame for cratering public confidence. Let’s return to the Department of Justice as an example: in 2015, it was Vanita Gupta,  the “institutionalist,” who was in charge of its Civil Rights Division. The next year, still in that post, she wrote the “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students,” an unofficial-but-official directive from the Departments of Justice and Education to schools around the country. It said that they “must allow transgender students access to [restroom and locker room] facilities consistent with their gender identity.” The letter defined gender identity as “an individual’s internal sense of gender.”

Surely I don’t need to elaborate much on the deep unpopularity of these ideas. Americans’ approval of self-identification for gender is 15 percentage points underwater, and bathroom-use-choice is at 12. Regardless of the letter’s legal or moral merits, it clearly played some role in undermining public trust in the Justice Department.

That is to say, there often exists a tradeoff between the unilateral pursuit of one’s own vision of the good and just, and the sort of hands-off democratic version of leadership that can win the public’s trust—the version endorsed by the Woodward Report, and favored by the Trust Committee.

But Gupta told us that she thought of institutions as “often the best vehicle … for making progress in the country.” Between that and her record at the DOJ, I figured she was more on board with the former option—with the unilateral changemaking operation—and willing to accept the associated cost in public confidence. It made her an odd choice for the Committee’s speaker series, sure—but a reasonable and consistent voice, at least.

And then an audience member asked Gupta point-blank about this tradeoff: asked how we might balance our commitment to free speech—hands-off democratic leadership—with our desire to promote only objective truth in the academy—unilateral top-down control. Gupta answered, “I view opinion as different from truth and facts.” She added, “I don’t see them as in tension.”

I found that odd. Differentiating opinion from objective truth can, after all, be rather difficult! Really, it’s there that the tension lies: could it be “objectively true” for affirmative action in college admissions to be just and right? Did Gupta believe it to be “objectively true” that “When a school provides sex-segregated activities and facilities, transgender students must be allowed to participate in such activities and access such facilities consistent with their gender identity”? Or was that an opinion? 

If it was an opinion, what business did it have as official Justice Department policy? What right did it have to order around people who might have disagreed?

These questions seemed to be of no import to Vanita Gupta. For her, institutions are simply means to political ends. And “truth-seeking” and “intellectual freedom” are irrelevant nice-to-haves.

And so I found myself even more puzzled at the Trust Committee’s choice to invite her. If Gupta denies the fundamental issue, that there’s something hard about properly balancing political motive with apolitical university priorities, then what help can she be toward finding a resolution?

If anything, it was precisely her kind of mindset which got us into this mess: the academics who thought their institution ought to be an engine of social change were the very ones who lost the public’s trust! As Jonathan Haidt has well-chronicled, the trust-plummeting era coincided with a fundamental reorientation of the university—from a primarily truth-seeking entity to one which pursued a unilateral (and unpopular) vision of social justice.

Disillusioned and disappointed, I looked back to the Woodward Report, seeking its wisdom. If the Trust Committee wouldn’t show me a path back to intellectual freedom, perhaps their 1970s equivalents could. In fact, they did: after the Report’s authors had explained all their reasons for favoring free speech, they also outlined some various “Ways and Means” by which Yale could achieve that end.

Recognizing the threat posed by “members of the university [who] do not fully appreciate the value of the principle of freedom of expression,” the Vanita Guptas of the academy, the authors’ first suggestion was “a program of reeducation.”

But perhaps that’s too strong. As unthinking and poisonous to the university as it may be, Gupta’s voice should not be silenced. Respecting academic freedom means respecting academics who place other values before it.

Still, the Trust Committee should remain skeptical of Gupta’s suggestions—especially after she was so dismissive of its mission. To paraphrase from Fiddler on the Roof: May God bless and keep Vanita Gupta… far away from Yale!