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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.”
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.
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.
The loss of trust narrative is also false. Politicians, think tanks, journalists and university scholars who advance that narrative overwhelmingly cite Gallup polling on higher education. Using Gallup polls to assert a uniform loss of trust in universities is inherently misleading.
Gallup contacts random participants. It measures impressionable public opinion from many people who likely have no direct connection to higher education. Gallup also concedes that declining trust in universities among Republican respondents is the predominant factor in their survey results.
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. The 2026 Gallup poll, however, measured decreased confidence in higher education among Democrats—partially because of Trump administration interference and the issue of AI in schools, not DEI. The ideological (not empirical) conceit that higher education has lost trust due to DEI misrepresents contributing factors to public perceptions of higher education. It also connects the loss-of-trust narrative to censorship.
Indeed, the loss-of-trust narrative is being deployed to undermine freedom of expression and academic freedom concerning anything that could be labeled as DEI. Florida’s Stop WOKE Act caricatured teaching about race and gender as indoctrination. Texas Tech University subjects classroom teaching practices to politically motivated scrutiny, suppressing teaching about race or gender. Institutions such as Brown University and Columbia University have entered into agreements with the federal government that purport to administratively erase the existence of transgender people or alter university curricula under political pressure. Brown’s agreement is a blueprint for the reflexive compliance with censorship that we are now seeing at many institutions.
The dominant story of higher education over the past decade is not a hostile takeover of universities by DEI or any other species of “wokeism.” It’s a story of rapidly increasing one-party ideological control over university teaching, research and governance.
Over half of U.S. students, PEN America reports, now study in a state that censors public higher education—mostly pertaining to race, sex, gender and multiculturalism. Political officials responsible for this historic wave of censorship decry “lost trust” in universities. Yet those same officials are never held accountable for blatantly exploiting the topic of trust to damage a system of higher education that other nations have envied for decades.
Universities are the product of relationships among institutions, political bodies and the public. A good-faith inquiry into the question of universities and public trust would encourage mutually respectful deliberation among all those parties, not a unilaterally punitive narrative that automatically sanctions universities for partisan benefit.
Universities have critical public obligations, including the pursuit of research in the public interest and preparing students for civic and professional life. Yet political officials and the public also have obligations to higher education itself. Diminishing the rights of university students and faculty for partisan reasons harms not only universities but those sectors of the public that benefit socially, politically and economically from them.
State and federal governments decimate a vital public good by arbitrarily stripping institutions of funding to support research and teaching for ideological reasons. The same is true when officials illegally censor free expression and academic freedom on campuses. Higher education leaders can build trust not by legitimating nebulous partisan rationales for punishing universities, but by fighting to protect the public resources as well as faculty and student rights of which they are stewards.
Let’s not only talk about trust. Let’s actually do it by having an evidence-driven, nonpartisan dialogue about the best ways to evaluate relationships between universities and the larger public.
We should consider what mutual obligations higher education and the public hold, using evidence-based methods at the community level to see how colleges are serving their students, communities and regions. Such substantive inquiry (not sweeping generalizations about universities’ alleged loss of trust) will probably yield reasonable criticisms that university leaders should engage in good faith.
But university leaders should scrutinize different expressions of public distrust and avoid rushing to engage in performative apologia at every criticism of their institutions. Sociopolitical groups in the U.S. and around the world mistrust higher education because of what universities do right, not because of alleged wrongs. Partisans express hostility toward universities precisely because they promote free expression, independent thinking and positive change. Some members of the public resist historians’ efforts to accurately document our country’s cruelest chapters. Fossil fuel companies notoriously oppose climate scientists’ fact-based conclusions about the environmental harms of their industry. And many people evidently become enraged when institutions honor their First Amendment obligations to permit student protest and faculty speech in as many forms as possible.
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.
