The element that will most immediately please conservatives is the committee’s recognition of the importance of free speech on campus. As noted elsewhere in these pages, the committee warns that “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship,” and presents practical solutions to both protect free speech and guard against self-censorship.

Citing a recent study that found that 82.3% of the university’s faculty were registered Democrats compared to just 2.3% Republicans, the report recommends measures “with the goal of enhancing open and critical debate on campus,” including having each department examine “the openness of its hiring and admissions practices to dissenting or underrepresented traditions.” Assuming the departments are honest in their self-evaluation, this would likely alleviate the ideological imbalance.

But as important as the issues of campus speech and intellectual diversity are, they are by no means the only major problems besetting higher education, and the report does an excellent job addressing several others.

Among them is the concern that Yale, like many universities, has lost a coherent sense of purpose. The report’s opening sentence begins with the simple but important observation: “Universities exist to preserve, create, and share knowledge.” But, as with so many schools, Yale has experienced a “diffusion of purpose” that makes it “difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.” This, in turn, creates distrust. The committee urges the school to return academics to the center of its identity.

That emphasis on the school’s academic mission carries important implications for other elements of the report. One way to reorient the school’s sense of purpose, the committee suggests, is to refocus attention to the classroom, including by “support[ing] a classroom environment conducive to full presence, focus, and interaction.” Translation: No devices in class. The committee members also urge their fellow professors to grade “like we mean it” by ending the degrading practice of grade inflation, and the administration to make academic achievement “the top priority in admissions decisions,” in part by reducing the number of “preferences for special classes of applicants.”

Another recommendation that may excite right-of-center reformers is the suggestion to encourage a sense of scholarly community among students by developing a shared curriculum. One idea the committee offers is “the creation of a civic education initiative that would reach every first year undergraduate student on a regular basis.” This could entail “day-long programs” that meet multiple times a year, “each devoted to a core dimension of informed citizenship.” If implemented, this suggestion would take part in the encouraging trend of programs in civic education emerging at larger public universities around the country.

The report also calls out the administrative bloat that is rampant in higher education, and rightly attributes “some of that growth [on] federal and state government pressures, which have established enormous legal and bureaucratic compliance processes.”

Last year, my AEI colleague Preston Cooper found that at America’s public universities, “about 70 FTE staff per 1,000 students are employed in roles that observers commonly consider ‘administrative’,” versus just 62 instructional staff members per 1,000 students. It’s even worse at private colleges, where “the ‘administrative’ categories add up to 91 staff per 1,000 students,” compared to about 80 members of the instructional staff per 1,000. This imbalance increases costs, reduces efficiency, and distracts from the core academic purpose of universities. It is excellent news that the Yale report identifies this problem and calls on the university to “collaborate with other like-minded university leaders to encourage and enable government departments and agencies to distinguish necessary from unnecessary academic compliance processes.”

What about the financial concerns related to college? The report encourages the university to expand financial aid opportunities and make its costs more transparent. It reasonably rejects the idea of free tuition for all students, but I do wish it addressed the possibility of a tuition freeze, which Purdue University has managed to maintain for 14 years. On the other hand, it is very encouraging that the report resists the idea that the primary measure of a degree’s utility is the size of a graduate’s paycheck. In the section titled “Deliver educational value,” the report encourages the university to place students in public-serving careers and to “reaffirm its commitment to the undergraduate liberal arts,” and to help apply a liberal arts degree to a “successful professional and civic life.”

REVIEW: AN OILMAN MEETS HIS MAKER 

There is, of course, the very big question of how many, if any, of these suggestions Yale will implement. The document is not binding, and it’s reasonable to conclude that the faculty and administration will be reluctant to follow through. But early signs are encouraging: The Yale Daily News reports a remarkably positive response from faculty and students alike.

The Ivy League is not the be-all, end-all of higher education in America. But it is better for America if the Ivies are flourishing rather than dying on the vine. This report is an encouraging sign that regrowth is possible.

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).