Harvard Doesn’t Need Your Trust

Elite universities want you to know that they are very, very sorry.

This spring, Yale published its 58-page “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis have followed suit, jointly commissioning a report as part of a project to “restore trust in higher education.”

Both reports assume that regaining trust is the key to surviving higher education’s present crisis. But that isn’t quite right. Institutions would be better advised to reduce their political salience — that is, to render themselves unattractive objects for the expenditure of scarce political capital.

Trust is an easy idea to grasp, but it doesn’t fit the political process as it exists. Political time and capital are finite. Americans, by contrast, can express “distrust” in as many institutions as they like: While answering a poll, expressing one’s distrust in an institution takes just minutes.

But, even while Americans can express their distrust against a theoretically unlimited number of institutions, politicians can only take definite action against a finite number of them. They must therefore prioritize issues that are politically salient.

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice only has so much bandwidth to pursue its many targets across civil society. Congress only has so much time in the legislative calendar. Even the president has limited political capital and can only spend so much of it upon attacking higher education. Case in point: As Trump pursued his wildly unpopular offensive against the people of Minneapolis, the New York Times reported that his administration had dropped its demand that Harvard pay a financial penalty — a strikingly soft position. (Trump himself disputed it the next day.)

Trust, then, is the wrong variable to target. What determines whether colleges and universities fall in the crosshairs isn’t whether Americans distrust them, but whether their opponents decide attacking them is worth the effort. Do they sit near the top of the conservative agenda alongside immigration, taxation, voting restrictions, and deregulation? Or do they rank far below? Higher education, luckily, has more control over its salience than it realizes.

On the state level, party control turns out to be a surprisingly weak predictor of legislative hostility toward higher education. Take Missouri and Texas, two Republican-controlled states. Between August 2024 and July 2025, Missouri legislators introduced more anti-DEI bills than any other state. Still, they enacted none of them. Texas, by contrast, has seen its Republican legislature dramatically curtail faculty control over hiring, curricular planning, and discipline.

The difference is not that Missouri Republicans suddenly learned to trust their universities. It is that, in Texas, higher education has picked needless fights with its legislators. Consider the case of the University of Texas at Austin. In February 2022, its faculty council passed a resolution opposing nationwide efforts to restrict the teaching of critical race theory. Should similar efforts reach the university, the statement said, it would “stand firm against encroachment on faculty authority.”

It was an unremarkable, non-binding statement of principle. That was enough to start a fight with the state legislature. Soon, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan G. Patrick proposed amending state law to strip tenure from any faculty member who taught the subject. And two years later, he helped pass Senate Bill 37, perhaps the most sweeping state law affecting the governance of public higher education in the country. He’d done so, he explained, because “the rogue faculty senate at the University of Texas foolishly questioned the Texas Legislature’s authority over higher education.”

The lesson is that minor institutional spats can become politically consequential when politicians decide they should be. Elite universities, now well aware they are not beyond the GOP’s reach, ought to learn from that.

What can they do? Rather than building broad, ill-defined trust, academic leaders need to avoid high-profile culture-war incidents. Harvard, over the last decade, hasn’t been particularly good at this.

When a graduate student, speaking as director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, publicly branded lecturer Carole K. Hooven’s defense of the terms “male” and “female” in medical teaching as “transphobic and harmful,” Harvard administrators said nothing, leaving a faculty member undefended against attacks made in the University’s own name. The Harvard Corporation stood by Claudine Gay as allegations of plagiarism mounted. And the Faculty of Arts and Sciences required tenure-track applicants to complete diversity statements — essentially ideological pledges of allegiance — until 2024.

These decisions were mistaken both as a matter of principle and of prudence. But Harvard doesn’t need to go out of its way to make overtures to any particular political tendency to endure the assault on higher education. It need not, as some students have proposed, dedicate special attention toward hiring right-wing professors or create a dedicated on-campus institute for conservative thought. And it doesn’t need to bar alumni interviewers from simply mentioning an applicant’s race or religion in their interview reports.

All these attempts at placating the right stem from efforts to win ill-defined “trust.” Still, Harvard does not need the right to trust it. It just needs to remain, in this political moment, less important to attack than everything else.

That strategy is a poor fit for public messaging. But it’s a more realistic goal than the alternative.

Alex Bronzini-Vender ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in History and Government in Lowell House.