Yale University released a candid report last week documenting why Americans no longer trust higher education in general and the Ivy League in particular. A ten-person faculty committee spent a year examining the collapse. One-third of Yale undergraduates, they note, no longer feel free to express political views in class, up from 17% in 2015. Public confidence in colleges and universities fell from 57% a decade ago to a historic low of 36% in 2024, according to Gallup. Seventy percent of Americans today say the sector is heading in the wrong direction. And Americans are more skeptical of Ivy League universities than any others.
But the report fails to identify the cause of the rising censorship and public mistrust, and Yale’s special role in it: the intellectual assault on Western civilization. That academic attack, or “deconstruction,” is aimed at undermining the central commitments of Western civilization, including the pursuit of truth. And it has been going on at Yale and other universities since the 1980s, and arguably longer.
