“Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”
So said a self-critical report published this month by Yale University, bemoaning the lack of intellectual diversity at their own college and most of the nation’s other leading campuses. Well, duh, readers of The Free Press might respond. To you, this report, which also cited problems in higher education including ballooning tuition fees, opaque and unfair admissions criteria, and grade inflation—may sound like a master class in the obvious.
But to many in academia, this is not obvious. Despite decades slipping into an ideological monoculture, many academics still don’t see a problem. Amid increasingly widespread scrutiny, they don’t understand why so many elite colleges have squandered public trust.
