Give Yale some credit. Its higher education report does correctly diagnose some of the problems and challenges of contemporary academia from a political monoculture to lack of free speech to affirmative action.

It then cautiously avoids confronting many of them.

For example, the report admits that Yale is largely left-learning and then argues that’s not really an issue.

It notes correctly that the system is terrified of free speech and that students and even tenured instructors live in fear of saying or teaching the wrong thing.

Tenured faculty have some of the strongest protections, but even some tenured faculty feel pressure to stay silent or refrain from saying what they really think. Faculty at all levels worry that the wrong book on a syllabus or the wrong idea expressed on social media may damage their careers or get them fired. Some of those concerns focus on informal pressures to conform to prevailing campus opinion, especially on matters involving race, gender, and sexuality.

The report urges protecting free speech, but has little in the way of useful recommendations for dealing with a radical campus movement embedded within its own departments at war with free speech. It correctly deplores the Halloween crackdown and what came with it, but offers no real reparations to the victims or tangible measures of protecting free speech in the same way that the woke left uses codes and systems to suppress free speech. The results are largely a display of liberal impotence.

The Yale report correctly acknowledges that the university drifted away from its mission resulting in some of these problems.

In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university. We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”

But at the same time it upholds the basis for the disastrous policy it decries…

In the United States, the system evolved differently, especially at private universities. Selective undergraduate admissions are oriented toward constructing a class, using a mix of objective and subjective criteria designed to serve the institution’s aims. At Yale, the foundation of the current system is often traced to a 1967 letter written by President Kingman Brewster. That letter argued that Yale should seek future leaders; that it should prioritize applicants whose capacities would let them benefit most from Yale’s resources; that motivation and moral seriousness deserve weight alongside ability; that variety in the class is an important goal; and that equality of opportunity for admission is essential. These remain worthy principles

And can only protest that academics should still be taken seriously in admissions. Maybe.

Yale’s admissions website currently states that “all aspects of [an] application are taken into
consideration,” that “there are no score cutoffs,” and that relatively low test scores “can still be helpful.” There is, in other words, no stated minimum threshold of academic preparation for admission. Whatever else holistic review allows Yale to take into account, the absence of any clear academic standard is difficult to reconcile with a mission built on academic excellence.

Except, as I previously wrote, Yale isn’t built on academic excellence, but on massive grade inflation.

At Yale, the average GPA is 3.7 and a cutoff was implemented to keep the number of honors graduates at 30%. At Yale, students turned brilliant so rapidly that you would have thought they were getting the Flowers for Algernon treatment. From 2010 onwards, grade averages rose a point every semester, going from 67 in 2010 to 73 in 2019, but COVID really boosted IQs so fast that in 2020-2021, nearly 82% of grades were A’s.

But whatever the average intelligence of the average Yale student may be, it’s clear that at least part of the problem lay with grade inflation in worthless woke courses. While 55% of Mathematics, 62% of Chemistry and 67% of Physics grades were A’s, 82% of Black Studies, 85% of Education Studies and 92% of Women’s Studies were A’s. Maybe students taking woke courses are smarter than the mathematicians and physicists of tomorrow. But probably not.

The report acknowledges grade inflation, but not woke grade inflation, and has little to offer in the way of a solution.

Over the past several decades, grading across many institutions has steadily lost its meaning. In 1963, ten percent of grades in Yale College were an A or A-. In 2022–23, that number was seventy-nine percent. Today, the median student at Yale receives an A…

The problem persists because no individual faculty member wants to be the strict grader whose students are disadvantaged relative to peers. No institution wants to be the outlier either. The committee heard firsthand accounts from instructors and lecturers who are not on the tenure track about the particular pressures they face, since their renewal depends largely on student enrollments and evaluations. The result is a collective action problem in which nearly everyone inflates and no one can stop.

Some departments clearly have more problems than others. All of this would go away if people could stop being awarded degrees in woke nonsense subjects like Black Studies, Women’s Studies and most other ‘Studies’ and if grades awarded in those classes stopped counting against GPAs scores.

Of course, Yale doesn’t go there. But so much for academic excellence.

Students aren’t paying attention in class and outsourcing their work to AI. Meanwhile professors are too terrified to give them a gentleman’s C.

.In our conversations with faculty and students, few concerns came up more consistently than the problem of sustained attention. Faculty described classrooms in which students are physically present but mentally elsewhere: scrolling, messaging, emailing. Students themselves largely acknowledged the problem. Few disputed that devices in the classroom undermine the learning experience, and many described feeling unable to resist the pull even when they wanted to.

AI has disrupted established forms of academic work. Certain assignments that once required sustained effort over hours or even weeks can now be completed almost instantly. Faculty across the university are scrambling to redesign syllabi and assessments. Whatever its promise, AI in its current use on campus undermines the expectations of focused, disciplined thinking that have long been the standard features of a rigorous education

So there’s no academic excellence. Or academics.

The report offers some sensible recommendations like banning phones from classrooms and moving to a lower grade average. It proposes asking each department to focus on open inquiry and a variety of approaches. These are well and good, but they’re also fantasies that don’t deal with the reality of the radical pollicization of entire academic fields and a student body prone to not just extremism, but violent extremism. These would have been great recommendations 20 years ago. Now they just seem like ways to try and appease a conservative presidential administration, growing alumni outrage and a flailing effort by some liberal faculty and leadership to turn back the clock to the academia of 1991.

I would welcome that, but what the report really does is acknowledge that Yale students are leftist idiots and they’re getting A’s anyway and being tiptoed around because everyone is terrified of them.

Changing that will require confronting realities, not just reasserting liberal principles.