DENY THERE'S A PROBLEM, CHANGE THE SUBJECT, AND QUESTION THE CRITIC'S MOTIVES.

That's the standard politician playbook for avoiding doing the necessary work, and two contributors to the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education adopt the formula in their "Enough With the Performative Apologia."

Because as the dorms fill up and game days resume, everything in class and in the common room is just fine.

Last month a federal appeals court struck down a Florida law that unconstitutionally limited teaching and expression about race and gender in university classrooms. Florida’s Stop WOKE law is only one of numerous measures that states and federal agencies have implemented since 2020 to punish higher education en masse, from bans on words and ideas in teaching and research to firings, reprimands and even arrests of either faculty or students for exercising First Amendment rights.

Many federal and state officials have clearly betrayed principles of free expression, independent thought and professional expertise in higher education. Yet journalists, political think tank operatives and some university leaders persist in alleging that higher education has lost public trust and must make amends. That assertion is empirically specious. Worse, many political actors invoke the loss of trust narrative to undermine university independence and promote historic levels of censorship in higher education. Most recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who has overseen unprecedented levels of federal interference with institutional autonomy and academic freedom, urged universities to adopt “reforms that will help restore public trust in higher education.”

Because everything is fine.  It's that mean Ron DeSantis and that Bad Orange Man and his gang of sycophants destroying our beautiful enterprise.

Only that's not the case.  "I've written about that so many times I should come up with a way of trademarking it!  'It took a long time for the academy to align itself so completely with a bundle of bad ideas. It will take a long time for better ideas to overturn the dominant paradigm.'"  Put briefly, "critical thinking" used to mean "how much of this statement stands up to careful scrutiny" while these days it's license to complain about the way things are, irrespective of how those things came to be.

The authors of the column acknowledge as much.

A healthy definition of civic trust shows how misguided the “loss of trust” narrative is. Trust implies mutual obligations and accountability. A wealth of scholarship describes what healthy civic trust looks like and how to practice it. Political scientist Robert Putnam defines it as the by-product of healthy, and inherently democratic, voluntary associations. Philosopher Danielle Allen stresses that citizens can build trust by practicing civic friendship. Both thinkers define trust as an expression of mutual respect, equality and reciprocity.

Instead of, oh, offering evidence of those networks of mutual obligations and accountability or calling attention to voluntary associations, the authors cast aspersions on the notion of voluntary association.

The claim that the public has lost trust in higher education is a hyperpartisan political assertion. It conforms to Public Choice Theory, which conservative and libertarian scholars pioneered decades ago. PCT aims to change public policy by prioritizing the alleged rationality of individuals and the private sector over the perceived flaws of collective decision-making in groups such as “the public” or “the people.” Adherents to PCT in the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and similar organizations seek to undermine public support for popular entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) to justify privatizing them.

Hyperpartisan messaging about lost trust in academia imitates previous “public choice” campaigns to diminish confidence in public schools and replace them with charter schools. “Reform,” according to these cynical campaigns, requires increased private control over public programs at the expense of collective decision-making. Adherents of PCT, who have successfully framed public discussion over universities today, view diminished trust in taxpayer-funded programs as a gain: It advances the elimination of public opinion from policymaking.

That's bonkers.  Changing the subject and questioning your critics' motives often is.  Libertarian thought is one way of viewing purposeful human interaction.  Public Choice theory is the application of the principal-agent problem to government actors.  If managers of corporations can get away with a little nest-feathering and not get fired by the stockholders, might that also be true of deanlets in public universities, or of government bureaucrats more generally?  As far as the impending collapse of the Medicare and Social Security "trust funds," what earthly connection there is, other than that some of the same people who would like private retirement options and trade-tested betterments in health services also advocate curricular reforms, including privatizations, of higher education.

Meanwhile, inside the enterprise, everything appears to be fine.

By contrast, actual university stakeholders express considerable trust in higher education. The American Association of Colleges and Universities regularly surveys a large pool of employers about their confidence in higher education to train graduates for workplace success; a large majority of them express confidence or high confidence in the abilities of colleges and universities to do so. Millions of students annually seek a college degree, and pay expensive tuition, because of its perceived value. A large majority of conservative students report positive undergraduate experiences.

A disturbing level of counterfactual commitment to the loss-of-trust narrative nevertheless persists among politicians, polemicists and university leaders. The Yale University Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education, released in April 2026, emphasized survey results from 2024—when public trust numbers hit a “historic low”—before briefly noting that the latest available poll at that time, from 2025, found increases since that time. Its authors did not cite a separate February 2026 Gallup poll that found “nine in 10 associate and bachelor’s degree students say they are confident or very confident that their education will both equip them with the skills needed” for desired jobs and help them “secure employment after graduation.”

The Yale report is typical in this respect. Mainstream journalists and some university leaders have advanced the loss-of-trust narrative by emphasizing negative results from lower-quality sources of data (those that do not survey university stakeholders) to legitimate a hyperpartisan premise.

The loss-of-trust narrative further undermines civic trust by being dishonest. The legible subtext of that narrative is that universities failed the public by prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion.

What amuses about that passage is that Gallup goes from a dubious source (click over to the story, I'm extracting bits) to a valid source when it supports the authors' priors.  Those positive experiences?  Do the polls include crosstabs decomposing answers by "intuitive understanding of option pricing" or "the elegance of Dutch portrait painting" or "game day and parties?"

Well, I'm twelve years retired and perhaps conditions in the common room and the classroom have improved."  Or not, as Cambridge's David Runciman notes.

Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

And, contrary to what the Inside Higher Ed columnists would have you believe, adjunctification is not only in North American universities, and scholars engaging in activism as a vita-enhancer is a thing.

When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter?

I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding. I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship. A lot of the grunt work of teaching undergraduates in Cambridge is done by junior academics on short-term contracts with precarious career prospects. Meanwhile, the professors, especially the ones who have been tempted in on favourable terms to newly endowed chairs, often get off lightly. It is an increasingly unfair system, which is one way to ensure that it will be shot through with politics from top to bottom.

"Increasingly unfair system" and endowed professorships getting off lightly.  That's a basic public choice argument, or a principal-agent problem if you wish.

That makes the concluding passage of the Inside Higher Ed column the sadder.

Healthy conditions of civic trust are too important to democracy itself to allow dishonest and exploitative uses of that concept to dominate public discourse about higher education. University leaders have a responsibility to scholarly communities and democracy alike—not to performatively concede politically motivated accusations of lost trust, but to insist that trust goes both ways.

I'm left with little choice other than to repeat a conclusion from nine years ago.  "Provide a rigorous curriculum, turf out the -studies departments and the lackeys in student affairs and housing, and perhaps the rest will take care of itself.  Or if not, well, I've offered lots of suggestions over the years about how next to proceed."