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​ April 27, 2026

 

Restoring the Academic Social Contract

 

Editor’s note: Last week’s Newsletter contained two separate items about the loss of trust in U.S. universities. The first was the recent “Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education” as written by prominent Yale faculty members after they themselves engaged in considerable interactions with faculty, students and others. The second was an essay written by Stanford alum and current University of Texas-Austin Provost William Inboden, “Restoring the Academic Social Contract.” 

 

We believe both of these documents should be circulated, if they haven’t been already, to Stanford’s trustees and senior officers and that these Stanford leaders should then publicly state their own responses to the critically important issues that are raised by these two, in our view very-well considered documents.

 

And while we would urge everyone to read Provost Inboden’s essay in its entirety, for convenience we are presenting here some longer excerpts because of what we believe is the importance of the issues and the quality of the analysis.

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Excerpts:

 

“Higher education in America sits at a paradox: American universities are simultaneously the crown jewel of the American education system and are also enduring their worst crisis in over a century. The crisis itself has multiple dimensions, including the financial challenges of escalating tuition and student debt burdens, the ideological imbalance among faculty and administrators, the institutional embrace of radical dogmas and speech restrictions, the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the deep ties many universities have forged with foreign nations whose interests are often inimical to the United States, and the new punitive measures that the Trump administration and Congress are wielding.

 

“Most fundamentally, the crisis is one of legitimacy and trust. It is now widely acknowledged that a critical mass of the American people has lost confidence in American universities. In last year's Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, compared to 32% who held little or no confidence....

 

“I do not approach this subject with disinterest. I love the American university. I have spent much of my career in academia, most recently in academic leadership positions at the University of Florida and now at the University of Texas at Austin. As an undergraduate at Stanford University and then graduate student at Yale, universities provided some of the most formative and enriching experiences of my early life....

 

“Most Americans love their universities, too -- even those who have also lost trust in higher education. Indeed, the controversies buffeting academia are so contentious because the stakes are so high. Americans know intuitively that universities matter a lot to our nation. From this knowledge flows the grief and anger over academia's problems, and the impassioned debates about what should be done. We fight over universities because we care about them....

 

“Over the past few decades, the combination of zealous progressives being drawn to academic careers and conservatives being discouraged (and sometimes even purged) from academia has cumulatively produced today's severe ideological imbalance of faculties and university administrations. The countless studies and surveys documenting this skew do not need to be recounted here. Suffice to say there are many humanities and social-science departments that do not have a single Republican on their faculties, and among social-science professors nationwide, there are more Marxists than conservatives. The only thing more remarkable than that ideological imbalance is how unremarkable most universities have regarded it -- at least if judged by how little most university leaders (including deans, provosts, presidents, and governing boards) have done to address it over that time span.

 

[Followed by discussion of the history of the modern U.S. university, the growing involvement of government funding and the increasing political imbalance that has occurred.]

 

“. . . With the clarity of hindsight, we can see that present concerns over higher education continue an unfolding reckoning that first emerged in the late 1960s and escalated into the 1980s, with the campus controversies over the meaning of the liberal arts....

 

“Not coincidentally, this era also witnessed the rise of campus speech codes, multi-culturalism, and ‘political correctness,’ the previous generation's antecedent to wokeness that similarly privileged progressive sensibilities while seeking to suppress unfavored views....

 

“Ironically, the indifference of too many academic leaders to the social contract extends to failures to honor academia's commitments to itself. Consider academic freedom: Over the past two decades, many of the most acute violations of academic freedom have stemmed not from politicians, but from within universities themselves. 

 

[Followed by discussion of the problems that have developed at U.S. universities, the involvement of foreign funding, and the degradation of the liberal arts.]

 

“The travails of the liberal arts also stem from a conceptual shift in the epistemology of several humanities and social-science fields of study. Some have embraced the dogma that the most important dimension of human existence is identity. A person or group's racial and sexual identities are seen as the most fundamental factors to study in order to understand them. From this follows a corollary focus on the power structures that sift and sort those identities and the framing of the social order, primarily into a dichotomy between oppressors and oppressed. It also produces scholarship that can be quite esoteric and jargon infused, sometimes to the point of parody, as shown by the ‘Grievance Studies Affair’ a few years ago when three academic pranksters successfully published several fabricated articles in scholarly journals devoted to various flavors of cultural studies and critical theory.

 

“The identity-studies framework is not without insight. Race and gender are important parts of who we are and how we interact with each other (and yes, how we sometimes oppress each other). Academic freedom protects such scholarship, and a genuinely pluralist academia will include scholars who focus on such areas as part of a faculty with a broad and diverse range of views. Yet when such schools of thought, often accompanied by partisan activism, exert an intolerant hegemony that captures entire departments or even fields, it suffocates meaningful academic inquiry. It also imperils the academic freedom of scholars who dissent from the department line....

 

“As a result, too many American history courses present the American past as a litany of oppressions and hypocrisies, leaving students with an imbalanced view of the United States....

 

“The issue is not one of partisan balance, but a balance of perspectives. Universities best serve their missions when they expose both scholars and students to multiple viewpoints. When faculties hold nearly monolithic convictions on topics such as sexual ethics, race, gender, the family, economic policy, immigration, abortion, guns, criminal justice, war and peace, and other critical issues that divide the country -- and on which people of good will can disagree in good faith -- important perspectives are lost in both research and teaching....

 

“Repairing the damage will not be easy. A problem that was created over a half-century cannot be solved overnight, or even in a year. Restoring the social contract between higher education and American society -- and updating it, as Harvard's Danielle Allen has urged -- must begin with academia's recovering the trust of the American public. That means universities must first and foremost remember that they are, quite literally, public trusts. The stakeholders in universities are not just the faculty and administrators that lead them, or the students who study at them, but also the parents, donors, and alumni who support them; state and federal officials who oversee them; and ultimately the taxpayers and citizens who fund and benefit from them.

 

[Followed by discussion of specific corrective actions taken at various universities.]

 

“Almost a century ago, University of Texas at Austin president Harry Yandell Benedict observed that ‘public confidence is the only real endowment of a state university.’ This is true of private universities as well. The social contract between America and her universities, which depends on public confidence, was not fully appreciated or understood until its rupture became painfully visible over the past few years. While the Trump administration's punitive measures against elite universities may dominate recent headlines, this crisis of public trust predates the election of Donald Trump. Both sides will need to do their part to repair and revive the social contract. Universities can take the first steps by renewing their commitments to the American people, our constitutional order, Western civilization, and the classical liberal arts.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and U Texas-Austin Provost William Inboden at National Affairs (Fall 2025).

 

See also our long-existing webpages:

 

• The Chicago Trifecta regarding (1) freedom of expression, (2) a university’s involvement in political and social matters, and (3) standards for academic appointments. Why reinvent the wheel when these three documents cover all of the key points?

 

• Stanford Concerns with detailed charts and numbers showing the administrative bloat that has developed at Stanford and is largely devoted to non-academic activities.

 

• Back to Basics at Stanford which, like the recent faculty report at Yale, urges that Stanford return to a focus on teaching and research.

 

• How Have Universities Changed from Their Original Purpose? at our Ask AI webpage including, from ChatGPT, "having moved from debate and disputation to avoidance of intellectual risk, from small-scale collegial community to large bureaucratic administration, from moral and intellectual formation to therapeutic and consumer-oriented models, from great texts to ephemeral trends and ideological agendas, and from intellectual humility to institutional self-certainty."

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror

Full op-ed by Penn Prof. Jonathan Zimmerman at Chronicle of Higher Education: “Despite our rhetorical commitment to ‘critical thinking,’ we typically present one side of an issue -- the left-wing side, almost always -- and call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political bias, although it is surely that. It is also a mark of bad teaching. Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes that nobody can see them.... The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and conformity is inimical to both education and democracy. Trump has ramped up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it.”

 

Princeton Alumni Call for Campus Leadership and Reform

Full op-ed at Princetonians for Free Speech: “Other universities, including Princeton’s great rivals, Yale and Harvard, are publicly recognizing the need for change and undertaking programs to address that need. For Princeton, the first step would be to admit reform is needed. It is a real and pressing matter.”

  

The Multibillion-Dollar Mistake Elite Universities Keep Making

-- The Yale Model for Endowment Investing Has Flopped

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Full op-ed by Pomona College Prof. Gary Smith at Chronicle of Higher Education: “Swensen moved Yale’s portfolio away from traditional U.S. stocks and bonds into venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, and other alternative asset classes (‘alts’). At the time of his death, Yale’s investment in domestic stocks had been reduced from 62 percent in 1985 to 2 percent in 2021.... I calculated the annual returns over the past 10 years for the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.... The results in the table show that none of these universities came close to beating the S&P 500.... How could such a great idea have gone so wrong?”

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

  

The Last Frontier: Why Stanford? 

“What I could not have anticipated before arriving is how Stanford rewards the student who, at first, feels like an outsider. Stanford’s most distinct and tightly-knit communities are often built by the students who assumed that they wouldn’t belong here in the first place.... So why choose Stanford, and why now? Not because it’s the safe choice. Not because it guarantees a certain life or hands you a predetermined path. Stanford is the right choice for the student who would rather be at the frontier than behind it, who is drawn to difficulty because of what the discomfort produces.” -- Stanford undergraduate Sloane Wehman

 

Jonathan Levin’s Path to the Stanford Presidency

 

Stanford's Campus Center to Get Makeover and New Gathering Spaces 

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