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Any discussion about declining "public trust" in higher ed needs to start with acknowledging that the default stance in media coverage of higher ed looks like this: bsky.app/profile/ashe...

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Reposted by Madhusudan 🦉 Katti

And not to mention that we have a media that has done everything in its power to undermine public trust in higher ed over the last couple of years. Even our industry newsletters hate us. bsky.app/profile/hule...

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University leaders seem to forget that "the public" includes students, faculty, and staff who study and work at the institutions they lead. The "public" is not some external, amorphous thing to the university. If you can't treat the people on your campus with decency, then yeah, they won't trust you

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How quickly we've forgotten how many of these university leaders sent the police to beat up peaceful student, faculty, and staff protestors! Start there if you want to talk about "trust."

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Higher ed leaders are worried about the "decline of public trust"; what are they doing about the fact that faculty, students, and staff at their own institutions do not trust them to lead effectively, defend academic freedom, and meet the challenges of the moment?

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Higher ed leaders are doing "decline of public trust" discourse in order to avoid talking about all the things they've done to undermine their institutions, including exploiting contingent faculty labor, attacking student protest, and underfunding the humanities

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That all of these universities producing reports on what the future of higher ed should be are collaborating with the American Enterprise Institute is a tell that they see this moment of higher ed "reform" as an opportunity to entrench reactionary policies and undermine the humanities further.

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I don't think it is possible for a report on the American university sponsored by academic leadership to accurately diagnose what is wrong with higher ed. Please read the critical university studies scholarship, which has been ignored in all these reports. provost.cornell.edu/_files/initi...

provost.cornell.edu

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For the Cornell report to give even a shred of credibility to right-wing propaganda that defames, undermines, and attacks the humanities and humanistic social sciences - indeed, which invalidate the very idea of peer review - is a sign that this report, much like the Vanderbilt report, is unserious.

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The Cornell report on the Future of the American University is a disaster, mainstreaming and endorsing profoundly reactionary right-wing diagnoses of higher education that have no business in a serious report on what higher ed is or should become.

Compare, for example, the Progressive Policy Institute’s report on The Distortion of American Studies
with a similar study of American political science from the Goldwater Institute: Richard D. Kahlenberg
and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a
Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026,
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies; Timothy K. Minella, “Peer Review
Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over
Scholarship,” Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-
report/peer-review-gone-wild/.

12 Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, “Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense,”
American Enterprise Institute, January 26, 2026, https://cfau.aei.org/five-reasons-viewpoint-diversity-
makes-academic-sense.
13 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading
Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January
22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies

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Again, the US isn't structurally racist because people *feel* it is. The US is structurally racist because empirical research across a wide range of fields, from history to sociology to economics, has *shown* it to be. This is the right way to think about US history, and people should be taught it.

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Predictably, the "research" section of the Cornell report reads quite badly from a humanities standpoint, completely insensitive to the particular needs of humanities disciplines. But maybe that's not surprising since the report endorses the idea that humanities research is ideologically corrupt.

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The purpose of teaching is to deliver that correct knowledge to students while showing them how much remains unknown and contested. Why would we do research if we weren't supposed to communicate what is true to others? Oh yeah - this is why they want to end humanities & social science research.

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Reposted by Madhusudan 🦉 Katti