Yale issues a clarion call for change, joining other leading universities. Where is Princeton?

On April 15, 2026, Yale President Maurie McInnis announced, in an open letter to the Yale community, the issuance of a blockbuster fifty-page report by a special committee of ten Yale faculty that called for reform across many aspects of Yale’s policies and educational practices. The report dealt extensively with PFS’s core issues of free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. But it also addressed other issues, such as affordability, admissions policies, political homogeneity, governance, grade inflation, the impact of technology on learning – all those issues that contribute to the decline in trust in higher education.

There is a particular kind of bad idea that thrives under the protection of academic freedom. Such a toxic philosophy does not contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Rather, it gains prominence within the academy precisely because it systematically poisons that marketplace from within. When it comes under attack from outside university gates, campus administrators invoke free inquiry and end up defending it as precisely the kind of controversial matter academics must be free to explore; professors assign it as cutting-edge gospel; students come to think of it as precisely what they’re attending college to absorb. 

Third Worldism is such an idea. Though it is not campus-grown like critical theory, it has found the American university to be an almost perfect habitat.

From higher ed journalism to concerned professors, AI is often portrayed as an unprecedented frontier to be tamed, a danger to both the future of the humanities and the independent, critical thinking abilities of its scholars. But a strict AI ban is superfluous, not to mention difficult to enforce: If students are plugging essay prompts into ChatGPT en masse, there are larger issues at stake that a band-aid AI ban won’t fix.

A couple of months ago, we spoke with the Chronicle of Higher Education about what they are calling “the conservative hiring boom.” At the time, it seemed clear to us that there was a “vibe shift” of sorts in terms of academic norms. Standalone DEI statements were on the decline, and there were anecdotal reports of heterodox scholars being recruited for faculty positions with a goal of increasing viewpoint diversity.

In light of this, we ran a poll asking folks about their perceptions of academic job market vibes, using an informal member email survey. We collected responses from 244 people working in higher education (77% of whom are HxA members). Here’s what we found.

Over the past few years, higher education institutions have adopted emerging artificial intelligence tools in an effort to enhance nearly every aspect of campus life—not just teaching and learning but also admissions, alumni networks, fundraising and advising. Now some are even experimenting with AI’s ability to advance one of the hottest trends on college campuses: fostering constructive dialogue among students, who are more divided over politics now than at any point in the past 40 years. 

In the golden decades that stretched from the end of World War II to the 2010s, there was almost no better business to be in than higher education.

What’s that you say? A university is not a business? Well, I take the point, but just the same, universities were certainly operating more and more like businesses, with glossy marketing campaigns, sophisticated plans to ensure more admitted students actually enrolled and elaborate price discrimination schemes designed to squeeze every last dollar out of students. Increasingly, they also adopted that classic business maxim: “The customer is always right.”