STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

July 6, 2026

 

Higher Ed Is Very Sorry

 

Universities Are Studying How They Lost the Public’s Trust

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust -- and how they might restore it.

 

“Three reports -- from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education advocacy group -- were released this spring. (Cornell is working on a study of its own.) The reports differ in their diagnoses of where higher education went wrong and, by extension, of what should be done now. But their mere existence proves, if nothing else, that America’s universities have finally gotten the message: People don’t like them very much....

 

“The report released by Vanderbilt and WashU, and written by a committee of humanities and social-science scholars from a number of prestigious universities, focuses on a much-discussed problem that’s notably absent from the AAC&U report: political slant. The authors dismiss the critique, common on the right, that academic departments employ too many liberals and not enough conservatives. The real problem, they argue, is that the pursuit of knowledge in certain fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has been subordinated to achieving ‘social justice.’ The report quotes a statement by the former president of the American Anthropological Association, who argued that its discipline was meant to 'challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.' (The association published a statement saying that the committee misrepresented the state of scholarship in the field.)

 

“Ideological commitments -- for example, the notion ‘that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology’-- can lead to shoddy scholarship or the suppression or obscuring of contrary findings....

 

“. . . ‘The only way you’re going to resolve this constant pressure from the political side, which is now coming from the right, is to fix your shop,’ Daniel Diermeier, the Vanderbilt chancellor, told me. Universities might not be able to prevent their critics from attacking them, but they’ve now acknowledged that they’ve been supplying the ammunition.”

 

Full op-ed at The Atlantic. 

 

See also the remedial actions we proposed several years ago at Back to Basics at Stanford.

 

We Have Never Taught Critical Thinking

 

AI Just Makes Those Failures Evident

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“In fall 2025, 90 percent of faculty surveyed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities said generative AI will diminish students’ critical thinking skills. The number should alarm us. But it also reveals something faculty rarely ask out loud: If a new tool can erode critical thinking this quickly, were we ever really teaching it in the first place?

 

“As artificial intelligence has continued to infiltrate classrooms and dorm rooms, much of the public narrative has focused on preserving critical thinking in the age of AI. Conversations focus on cognitive offloading, how AI is reducing friction in the learning process and the risks of dependency on AI systems.

 

“And yet, while we tout the importance of critical thinking skills for college graduates, we do very little to explicitly teach those skills. This has led to a long-standing but often overlooked critical thinking crisis, one that predated AI. In fact, one major study found that at least 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing over their first two years of college....

 

“We have managed some success thus far because students develop a semblance of these skills through the friction of research, drafting and revision. However, as AI erodes our ability to force friction into the learning process outside the classroom, we even more urgently need to turn to developing these skills directly rather than through proxies....

 

“A 2025 study reported a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool use and critical thinking scores, with younger users showing the strongest effects. Notably, however, another 2025 study from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon researchers found that self-confidence in one’s own abilities predicts higher levels of critical thinking by knowledge workers even when they use AI. This is an important finding for educators, as self-confidence in thinking is exactly what explicit critical thinking instruction can teach.

 

“When 90 percent of us say a tool can erode the thinking we claim to develop, we are making an admission about how fragile that development was in the first place. If we want students who can actually think critically in a world saturated with AI-generated content, we have to stop treating critical thinking as an emergent property of higher education and start treating it as a discipline that requires instructor training, explicit instruction for students, deliberate practice and its own place in our curriculum.” ...

 

[Followed by discussion of possible actions, etc.]

 

Full op-ed at Inside Higher Ed.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

A Debate on College Sports

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Introductory article at Minding the Campus with this partial prompt: “Has collegiate athletics become too large a part of the modern university, or is it an essential component of campus life and institutional success? What are the strongest arguments for and against significant investments in college sports, and how should colleges determine the proper relationship between athletics and academics?”

 

• Essay by Georgia State Prof. Rob Jenkins here: “College athletics bring costs and controversies, but they also strengthen campuses in ways few other programs can.”

• Essay by Ohio U Prof. Emeritus Richard Vedder here: "The business of collegiate athletics has outgrown the educational mission of the university.”

 

Reclaiming Pen and Paper

 

Full op-ed by Patrick Henry undergraduate Harrison Hutton at James Martin Center: “One harsh reality of the AI world is that academic integrity policies are nearly impossible to enforce in a virtual environment. And even if they were, the pace of technological development can only lead to an arms race that university systems are already losing.”

 

HAI Student Affinity Groups Take On Society’s Emerging Questions

 

Full article at Stanford News website: “The program creates opportunities for students whose coursework would otherwise never have intersected to explore critical issues in AI, challenge each other’s thinking, and develop new approaches to the technology to ensure it benefits all.”

 

Empty Lectures Stem from Students’ Fractured Relationship with Effort

 

Full op-ed by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Prof. Mario Senovilla and researcher Elena Liquete at Times Higher Education: “In one of our seminars in Madrid this year, five students stood out. They came every week, prepared, asked questions and did the work. In a group where most seats were empty, they were impossible to ignore. They were all the children of Chinese immigrants, raised in Spain but educated in the values their parents brought with them.”

 

How Yale Tried (and Failed) to Avoid Trump’s Wrath

 

Full op-ed by Yale undergraduate Zachary Clifton at The Nation. See also “DEI Retreats from America’s Medical Schools” by Penn Prof. and former Associate Dean Stanley Goldfarb at NY Post. 

 

To Meet 144% Spike in Demand, Syracuse Launches Specialized AI Degrees

 

Full article at College Fix.

 

Can Civics Centers Revive Higher Education? (podcast, 70 minutes)

 

Full podcast at ACTA.

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities

at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

AI Designs the Ideal Burger for Taste, Health and Planet

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Battling a Deadly Infection and Curing Aplastic Anemia

 

Supercharged Natural Killer Cells Take on Solid Tumors

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