Yale Studied Itself, Which Was the Problem

In life, sometimes you need someone on the outside—a friend, a colleague, a stranger with no stake in your story—to point out the flaws, the mistakes, the oversights you cannot see in yourself. Universities are no different. Yale is no different. I say this because Yale recently released its Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education and some of the recommendations —such as number 15, a proposal to institute three day-long programs per year as the answer to the absence of any common intellectual experience for Yale undergraduates—were ridiculous responses to a serious problems. My argument was not difficult to make. It was, in fact, fairly obvious. Which is the point of this piece. An outsider noticed the problem in a single afternoon. The 10 tenured Yale faculty who spent a year writing the Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education did not. Outside committees exist for a reason. The most revealing fact about the Yale report is not in the report. It is in the masthead. President Maurie McInnis convened ten people to study why Americans don’t trust universities like Yale. All 10 were tenured Yale faculty. No community college president. No state legislator. No skeptical journalist. No parent who passed on the Ivy League. No outside academic from a public university. Yale studied trust between itself and the American public by talking to itself. This is striking because Yale, like every American research university, does not normally assess itself this way. The principle that honest self-assessment requires outsiders in the room is woven into the basic architecture of academic life. When a department reviews itself, an external visiting committee shows up—faculty from peer institutions who read the self-study, sit through interviews, and write a frank report. When a doctoral candidate defends a dissertation, an outside reader often sits on the committee. When a university seeks reaccreditation, a team of peer educators visits campus and evaluates it against shared standards. These are routine procedures, and they are routine because self-assessment requires the perspective of people who do not share the local incentives or the local culture. Yale itself documents these practices. According to Yale’s accreditation office , the university’s decennial NECHE reaccreditation consists of a self-study followed by “an on-site visit by a visiting team of peer educators.” Yale College’s standing committees conduct periodic external reviews of departmental and interdisciplinary majors . More than 25 specialized accrediting agencies evaluate Yale’s professional schools. Every member of the trust committee has, somewhere in a long career, sat on one side or the other of these structures. They know how the discipline works. The committee acknowledges the problem on page six. Early commenters questioned whether 10 tenured Yale faculty could effectively study public trust. The committee recognizes the concern, says it “redoubled our commitment to reach out as widely as possible,” and proceeds with 10 tenured Yale faculty. The remedy was, in essence, to listen harder. But academic self-assessment already had a more rigorous remedy on the shelf, and Yale chose not to use it. The case for external members was actually stronger here than for an ordinary departmental review. A literature department’s external review concerns scholarship insiders know intimately. The trust inquiry concerned how Yale looks from outside; precisely what insiders cannot see. If outsiders are required to evaluate Yale’s physics program, where insider knowledge is indispensable, why would they not be required to evaluate Yale’s relationship with the seventy percent of Americans who say higher education is heading in the wrong direction? The predictable rejoinder is that tenured Yale faculty have the protection to speak frankly, and that external members would have introduced political pressures the committee was meant to avoid. The committee was plenty candid; that is not the issue. The issue is epistemic access. There are things insiders cannot see about how their institution looks from outside, and no amount of candor from inside the room substitutes for the perspective of someone standing outside it. A friend tells you what you cannot see about yourself not because you lack courage but because courage is not the relevant faculty. The consequences show up throughout the report. The recommendations are narrow and procedural—the natural product of a body that shares assumptions about what counts as serious institutional response. Recommendation 15—three days a year as a “civic education initiative”—is the cleanest example. An outsider with no stake in protecting the existing curriculum would have flagged it immediately. Ten Yale faculty did not. McInnis charged the committee to think big and tell the truth. The committee did its best. But it was asked to study an outside problem from inside a closed room. The next inquiry, and there will need to be one, should open the door. The post Yale Studied Itself, Which Was the Problem appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .