This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Peter MacKinnon, July 23, 2026
Canadian universities have been largely silent in the face of reports that intellectual life in them has been diminished. The most compelling reports have come from American sources which may explain the satisfaction of some that Canada is somehow different, and that our universities do not suffer from afflictions reported by institutions south of the border.
A May, Yale University report on declining trust in post-secondary institutions found that declining trust was real and serious, and identified some of the reasons: costs; admissions without transparency and often driven by non-academic criteria; pressures toward conformity, intimidation and social shaming; and self-censorship and ideological echo chambers resulting from homogeneity (on the left) in the professoriate.
The solution, or part of the solution, recommended by the report was for a refocus on “what makes a university a university” as expressed in Yale’s historical mission “to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” The mission does not include institutional pursuit of social justice, cancel culture, decolonization or race-based recruitment of faculty and students.
The Yale study is joined by an April report from Vanderbilt and Washington universities titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.” The report was written by ten senior scholars from six of America’s most renowned universities, and was motivated by a concern among chancellors and presidents “about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials as well as by…complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.”
The complaints include the misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists, the embrace of problematic views of truth, evidence and knowledge, and ideological values that distort the search for truth in those disciplines.
The committee found grounds for concern — systematically — about the quality of scholarship and norms in its production that suppresses scholarship challenging a “rigidly enforced orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues, and which substitute moral and political standards for properly academic standards in the evaluation of scholarship.”
The report ends by saying that the failings these scholars discovered are “serious” and “are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university, but strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.”
The Yale study and the Vanderbilt and Washington report should be read in Canada and should inspire investigation of their relevance here. They are detailed, evidence-based and written by scholarly observers. Many or most in our universities may be comfortable in feeling that they are not relevant in Canada, but that comfort should not be shared by the rest of us. The same issues are present here and require the attention not only of our universities, but of governments, businesses, alumni and other supporters.
Peter MacKinnon is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Aristotle Foundation, and the author of Confronting Illiberalism (University of Toronto Press, 2025).
