David Bromwich on Why Americans Have Lost Faith in Universities

But trust, as anyone who has studied moral philosophy or just speaks English knows, uh, is mutual and it depends on an understanding that is shared of what the purpose is of this or that institution, this or that custom or ritual. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk longtime listeners of this podcast will know that I very much care about higher education. I love my job as a professor uh at an American university. I think universities do a lot of good things in the world and I'm also frustrated.

with some of the real shortcomings of American universities and with a way in which they have squandered a lot of the public trust. About 10 years ago, most Americans had deep trust in American higher education. The number of people who do has now gone down to about a third of a population. And that I think is a genuine existential threat for their long term existence.

Well, as you may have heard, there is an interesting development in this area, a report by a committee of faculty members at Yale University on trust in higher education, which is asking the question of how it is that universities have lost so much trust and what it is they might be able to do in order to regain some of that trust. And whereas a lot of people were expecting a very lowest common denominator report that puts the problem at the feet of everybody else and calls for a couple of very cosmetic changes in response, the piece of writing that Yale came up with is actually much more interesting than that. So I asked one of the members of this committee, David Bromwich, the Sterling professor of English at Yale University and a sometime contributor to persuasion, to come on the podcast to tell us about what they found, about why it is that universities are too expensive, too opaque in their fee.

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