Subcommittee on Trust
Issue Summary and Core Questions, November 2025
Anthony Burrow, Drew Margolin, Sheila Olmstead, Jocelyn Rose, Phoebe Sengers, Praveen Sethupathy, Adam T. Smith (chair)
No crisis facing universities today is more consequential than the loss of public trust. Recent survey data indicates a broad decline in trust that extends across ideological and demographic lines. A 2023 Gallup poll found that only 36% of Americans express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a substantial drop from 48% just seven years prior.1
The drop in confidence has been driven by a number of concerns. The first is financial, as escalating tuition costs coupled with a perceived decline in the economic value of an undergraduate degree lead many to question the return on investment in higher education. The second concern is ideological. Accusations of bias have eroded confidence in the ability of universities to foster open intellectual inquiry and promote academic freedom as a collective good, rather than a means to promote a single point of view. These concerns have been exacerbated due to policy controversies around high visibility issues, such as COVID-19 vaccines and the likely impacts of climate change. Finally, federal agencies are raising concerns about scientific integrity.
The current crisis of trust is not isolated to universities but is part of a broader decline in trust across American institutions, including government, media, and industry. As identified by our Technological Change and Artificial Intelligence Subcommittee, new technologies like AI bots and deepfakes drive an erosion in authenticity, challenging the discriminating power of critical thought and fact-based assessment. Meanwhile, political polarization, driven by a media environment that rewards outrage, frames difference and disagreement as implacable division. This erosion in mutual goodwill is compounded by widespread feelings of fear and vulnerability both on university campuses and beyond, creating significant headwinds for trust-building efforts. In order to address this crisis, it is critical that we understand what we mean by trust and what is at stake in re-establishing American faith in higher education.
The Status of Trust
Trust describes an implicit disposition of goodwill that allows human communities to work effectively toward common ends, cooperate despite uncertainty, and promote a general sense of security among community members. Trust is mutual, emerging reciprocally amidst individuals, roles, and groups who are defined by both similarity and difference. Trust is a key civic skill for any pluralist community. American universities cannot survive without public trust, and the United States cannot long endure without the trust that universities help to create.
The core missions of the American university – education, research, and community engagement – all depend upon sustained relations of trust within the academic community and between the university and its public stakeholders (as explored by our University-Government Relations Subcommittee). At the same time, the research and training provided by universities establish the foundational condition of trust that underpins everyday life across American society. Everything from safe transportation to effective medical care all depend on not only the expertise of university educated professionals, but on the critical thinking of American consumers. Thus, when universities function at their best, trust is a key product of our core activities, creating citizens who engage with one another in all walks of life on the basis of an implicit disposition of goodwill. Universities can play a critical role in teaching citizens how to trust, distinguishing fact from fiction and fostering cooperation amidst diverse opinions and backgrounds. Trust in institutions is mutually reinforcing and as such a collapse of trust in American universities not only imperils their internal functions but also threatens the development of thoughtful public policy and the broader fabric of American society.
Addressing the current crisis requires recognizing several key principles. First, we must recognize that trust within the university and public trust in the university are closely intertwined. Our students move fluidly between our campuses and the wider world; our faculty and staff live at once in both worlds. And social media allows us all to be simultaneously on campus and off. Hence, even as events far from campus shape university activities, work to build trust on campus has tremendous power to reverberate far beyond.
Second, the crisis of trust on campus is not reducible to us vs. them. It cuts across units and positions often leaving faculty, students, administration, and staff suspicious not only of others but of one another. Cross-cutting bonds of trust that unify the university are vital to achieving the shared mission of the institution.
Third, building trust requires time and deliberate action. Thus, even as we recognize the challenges of the moment, the focus of the Provost’s Committee on the Future of the American University is on identifying the essential and actionable levers of trust in building strong universities over the long term.
Looking to the Future
The committee is focused on four core missions, where trust is both vital and currently under pressure:
- Undergraduate Education: Students and parents question the value of investment due to debt, unclear benefits of combining personal cultivation with pre-professional training, and changing career paths. These economic concerns fuel a crisis of confidence in universities as engines of social mobility, raising questions about balancing excellence with access. At the same time, universities face accusations of ideological bias, particularly on "culture war" issues like racial equality, gender identity, and free speech.
- Graduate and Professional Education: A contracted academic job market and a mismatch between PhD training and professorial hiring has stoked disenchantment in the value of higher education. In addition, criticism of diversity programs, including in graduate admissions, and concerns over the diminishing value of traditional merit metrics have impacted trust.
- Scholarship: Public concerns regarding the value of federal investments in university-based research have been exacerbated by the high cost of funding research at universities, and high-profile cases of research fraud in which retractions have undermined trust in the integrity of university-based research.
- Public Impact and Community Engagement: Uncertainty over whether universities provide a private or public good leads to questions about whether they are fulfilling their public obligations. Moreover, the politicization of scholarly research (e.g., climate science and vaccine policy) challenges the university’s ability to contribute fact-based knowledge without being delegitimized as activist.
Research has identified shared language, common culture (rooted in heritage), mutual interests, and a collective image of the future as key sources of mutual trust in large organizations. Currently, each of these is under considerable stress within universities and in their relationship with the public. The future of American universities depends on restoring internal trust and reinvigorating public trust in their core activities. This requires a continuous and long-term commitment to trust-building both on and off campus.
Core Questions
- What activities of the university most successfully cultivate trust in our students and alumni? How can universities better cultivate a culture of mutual trust on campus?
- How can universities leverage their core missions to promote public trust?
- Amongst the diverse approaches to public engagement already on campus, which most effectively promote mutual trust with communities locally and globally?
- Which practices of the university harm trust in our research and educational missions?
Footnote
-
This number did recover a bit in a 2025 survey, rising to 42%, which is nevertheless a deeply concerning figure. Much of the reporting on the 2025 results noted that it was the first discernible increase in trust in universities in over a decade. Return to origin