The Academic Value of Trust
There’s good reason much of the public has lost trust in higher education.
Editor’s note: Below is a preview of an opinion piece published Tuesday, May 12, 2026 at Inside Higher Ed. To read the full article, click here.
The concept of trust is front and center in contemporary discussions about the crisis in higher education. Hardly a week goes by without someone flagging the Gallup poll showing that trust in higher education is at or near an all-time low. In response, universities are taking action. Recent reports like the ones out of Yale and Harvard Universities are pitched as solutions to the growing trust deficit. Yet some critics of this work insist that it’s not a breach of trust for universities to expand their mission and even that “trust is not an academic value.” Higher ed reformers are tilting at windmills.
To see who’s right, we need to disambiguate two different questions about trust in higher education. The first is empirical: Why has trust in higher education cratered over the last decade? No doubt the answer to this question is complicated. The causal factors behind the trust deficit are likely to be many and varied. We should look to the social sciences to help untangle them.
None of this complexity should have any bearing on the second question about trust. This question is not empirical but normative: Is the reduction in trust reasonable? Answering this second question requires us to go beyond social science to ask whether trust is an academic value and about the conditions under which that trust is properly earned.
I will offer an answer to the second question. Trust is an academic value. It’s an essential feature of our division of epistemic labor and something that will be either earned or squandered by institutions of higher education. While I’m less confident about the causal drivers of the recent trust gap, I’m far more confident that it is rational for people to trust universities less than they did 20 years ago.
Two Types of Trust
There are no doubt many different conceptualizations of trust, but two in particular are relevant for higher education: epistemic trust and social trust…
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The idea that we need to make an argument in defense of "trust" in higher ed is one more indicator at how bad things have become. I always assumed that trust was one of those self-evident truths that did not need any defense. But I was wrong.
Defund, dismantle, and re-invent higher education--Now.
Tinkering around the margins with a massively corrupt, broken system isn't going to get it done.
I appreciate you explaining epistemic and social trust. I also agree with the piece mentioning people refuting or verifying scholars. Thank you for writing this article.