What’s the Point of Elite Universities?
It’s time to start teaching civic virtue again.
Ariane de Gennaro is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move, and an incoming JD candidate at Harvard Law School. She previously wrote for the Yale Daily News and worked in the office of Senator Mazie Hirono.
Stanley Wang is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative. He is currently pursuing a master’s in economics at the London School of Economics and is a graduate of the College of William & Mary. Before RDI, Stanley served as an AmeriCorps VISTA member.
We’re coming off of graduation season. With the flood of congratulations and caps tossed in the air, the university is on many people’s minds.
Elite institutions tend to be the focus of national attention. Many people would give anything to attend these schools: The Ivies. Stanford. MIT.
They live rent free (thought certainly not tuition free) in the public imagination, from Good Will Hunting to Gilmore Girls. With presidents, tech innovators, and world-renowned scholars among their graduates, these schools are seen as a shortcut to influence, success, and prestige.
Lately, however, another type of elite college graduate has been in the news. Cole Allen, who tried to assassinate President Trump, earned his degree at CalTech. Luigi Mangione, who murdered healthcare executive Brian Thompson, is a graduate of Penn.
It’s time we took our top schools off of their pedestals and subjected them to some real examination. We have both attended leading institutions—Ariane is a graduate of Yale, and Stanley will soon finish at the London School of Economics (where Americans have a large presence). He is also a graduate of the College of William & Mary.
We know firsthand that the elite university may teach students how to be exceptional, but it does not necessarily show them how to be good.
It is a reality that many of the people who pass through these schools’ hallowed halls end up wielding great influence in politics, business, and media. It follows that top-ranked universities also have an outsized responsibility to the public.
An April 2026 Yale report tackled this exact issue. The Committee on Trust in Higher Education concluded, after a year of research, that Yale and its peer institutions have contributed to a decline in public trust in higher education. The report offered suggestions across a broad range of areas, from addressing grade inflation to protecting freedom of speech.
One key recommendation: adjust Yale’s mission statement.
The report asserts that part of the flagging trust in academia stems from “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education.” Is it simply a certification? A mark of prestige? Or are our universities meant to create good people; good citizens?
In 2016, Yale’s mission statement was revised to affirm a commitment to “improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice” and to educating “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society.”
This statement reflected a longstanding assumption that these universities exist not only to provide practical or academic education, but also to cultivate moral virtue with an eye towards improving society as a whole.
The school’s original 1701 charter stated that Yale, then the “Collegiate School,” was a place “wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.”
The explicitly Protestant language has long since disappeared, but the underlying ideal remained: academic excellence paired with public service and a higher duty to civic life. This expectation makes sense. After all, shouldn’t we want those most likely to rise to power to possess not only intelligence, but character?
No, says Yale’s new report. Moral virtue is out of the university’s wheelhouse.
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The report recommended narrowing the university’s mission statement, and in late April, Yale did just that. The new statement declares that Yale’s goal is to “create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” No mention of virtue, public service, or civic life. No mention of how to apply the knowledge gained.
For a report ostensibly about institutional responsibility, Yale seems to be shirking it. It is not on us to create good, moral leaders, the argument goes. Leave that to someone else.
But if not in the universities that funnel graduates into the halls of power, where will people be trained to wield authority with care? If elite schools cannot make people good, it seems they should at least strive to make sure they are not careless, arrogant, or downright evil.
Yet the record is evidently mixed at best. Ivy League graduates are often publicly unpopular and even unsavory characters. While elite universities are often accused of leaning too far left, many graduates are among the most controversial figures on the right as well. Take Princeton’s Ted Cruz, Yale’s JD Vance, and, of course, Penn’s Donald Trump.
Of course, most graduates of elite universities are neither corrupt presidents nor perpetrators of political violence. More often, they are simply morally adrift, caught in the gap between “knowing good” and “doing good.” In our classrooms, we cover our eyes and pretend that this gap doesn’t exist. In ethics courses—if students even get around to taking one—we engage in eloquent deliberation between choosing the one person on the trolley tracks or the five, but students never learn how and when to actually pull the lever. So, too many simply don’t act. They leave college and take a path of least resistance, selecting careers from among corporate law, finance, and consulting as if they were choosing starter Pokémon.
And there is a much subtler and more common ethos among these students and alums that, while not overtly immoral, is still off-putting and, frankly, rude.
In the opening scene of The Social Network, a fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) has a relationship-ending conversation with his girlfriend, Erica.
Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, treats his partner—who attends Boston University—with shocking dismissiveness.
Attempting to extract herself from the conversation, Erica says she needs to go study.
“You don’t have to study,” Mark says.
“Why do you keep saying I don’t have to study?” Erica snaps.
“‘Cause you go to BU,” Mark matter-of-factly replies.
What would it take to erase this egoistic attitude? To create virtuous leaders again?
For one thing: we ought to move from a solitary focus on material success and output to values, service, discomfort, and practice.
That means doing difficult things for the benefit of others. Cold mornings spent volunteering. Long nights sitting with open-ended questions that no one grades you on, rather than simply solving problems for a gold star. That’s what higher education institutions might look like if they returned to the deliberate formation of moral character.
The elite university may not cultivate bad behavior intentionally, but it often engenders it by telling students they are extraordinary without giving them the moral framework to apply their talents with humility, grace, or care. The elite university produces brilliant people while being unwilling to interrogate what such brilliance should be for.
The Renew Democracy Initiative, publisher of The Next Move, is pleased to join the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, as a media partner for the third annual Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference—LibCon 2026—in Washington, DC on July 16 and 17. Click here for more information and to register. Coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, the theme of the conference is the Reconstruction Agenda. The conference will assess the damage that authoritarian and demagogic politics have caused to the country’s liberal institutions and propose a path forward to rebuild accountability and confidence in the rule of law. The conference features a stellar lineup, including RDI Vice Chair Linda Chavez, along with Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, David French, Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law and many more. We’ll be there and so should you.
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Communication interns? Look at your first line. The word of should not follow the word off in good communication, verbal or written.
The key difference I see in the change of Yale's mission statement is dropping two references to the world--the global aspiration is completely gone. This may reflect either a recognition that the university no longer stands out so much as world-class, or most likely, that it recognizes it may be difficult in the America First era to bring in as many international students as it previously did. In either case, it is a major, sad retreat. Get well soon!