Yale has changed its institutional mission statement, one of the first results from a recent faculty committee report on how the university needs to change to regain the public's trust.gettyYale University has changed its mission statement. The decision appears to represent the first tangible institutional policy change since the last month’s release of a much-publicized faculty committee report that made 20 recommendations for how the university could help set an example for regaining public trust in the value and purpose of higher education.The committee had recommended that Yale revise its mission statement. In place of the statement’s former language, which emphasized the lofty ideals of "improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community,” the committee proposed a return to basics that would be consistent with the current Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”The statement, now posted on Yale’s website simply reads: “Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”Yale President Maurie McInnis referenced the change in a campus “end-of-year” email Thursday, without specifically attributing it to the report’s recommendation. “I welcomed the committee’s recommendations to reaffirm Yale’s core mission,” McInnis said in a separate email to the Yale Daily News. “Over the past week, I have received many supportive comments about this recommendation, and I have discussed it with the deans of schools and the board of trustees,” she wrote. MORE FOR YOUIn its 58-page report, which touched on a wide range of topics including academic freedom, admissions, financial aid, university governance, grade inflation, and classroom expectations, the committee wrote that Yale’s prior mission statement — approved in 2016 when Peter Salovey was president of the university — contained worthy goals, “but they are not what makes a university a university.” It added, “at a moment when higher education is being buffeted from all sides, it is imperative to understand what we are here for and what universities do best. That requires clarity, not diffusion, of purpose.”The Yale report has received mix reviews. Some pundits have praised its candor and commitment to self-examination, calling its analysis a “long overdue” reckoning with its responsibilities. “A mission statement anchors a university’s goals and purposes, and therefore I am very happy that President McInnis has seen fit to affirm one of the Trust Committee’s key recommendations,” Julia Adams, one of the committee’s co-chairs, wrote in an email to the News.Others, however, have criticized what they perceive to be a retreat from a larger social purpose. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote that although the report was “full of smart and sensible recommendations,” which was “not surprising when one sees the smart and sensible faculty members who wrote it,” its call for a narrower missions was not an advance, it was a defense strategy. "The retreat from public purpose will not enhance trust; it will further erode it. A lack of public engagement and an air of cloistered privilege are a big part of why so many people now view universities with suspicion. Retreating further behind the gates will make a bad situation much worse," argued Roth.Anne Kim, writing in Washington Monthly, described the report as “unexpectedly self-flagellatory and said that while it would help improve Yale’s internal operations, it ”falls short of a broader remedy for higher education’s woes. It also unfortunately exemplifies the self-centeredness that has earned elite colleges public disdain…the Yale report interprets the problem of distrust in higher education through the narrow prism of itself and its equally cosseted peers. The result is a grave misdiagnosis of what’s gone wrong with the public’s perceptions of higher education."The report has prompted a healthy debate about the purpose of higher education and the reasons the public has been losing confidence in it recently. It is certainly true that universities need to be more open to change, but one can still question if their current policies and practices, most of which have been in place for a long time, are the primary drivers of the discontent and resentment now directed at higher education.