Rebuilding trust in HE requires value-driven change

The attendees at the Magna Charta Observatory (MCO) from 14 to 16 October at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania, will need no convincing from the keynote speakers who come from the United States, Britain and Colombia that while the problems may differ from country to country, worldwide higher education faces a polycrisis.

Titled Beyond Resilience: Universities as Active Value-Driven Agents in a Changing World, the 2026 Anniversary will bring together university leaders, academics and institutional partners from across the globe to reflect on the evolving role of universities in a time of geopolitical uncertainty, technological transformation and societal change.

The theme has been shaped by the priorities expressed by Magna Charta signatory institutions, highlighting the importance of strengthening institutional autonomy, safeguarding academic freedom, reinforcing public trust and promoting democratic engagement.

The need to reinforce public trust has become increasingly important in the context of the polycrisis universities are facing.

In March, the Academic Freedom Index reported that academic freedom had declined in 50 countries – more than five times the number of countries where it had improved; the country where it had declined the most was the United States.

In July, the Global Coalition to Protect Education From Attack reported that some 10,600 school and university students, teachers, professors, and education personnel were harmed in the 24 months beginning 1 January 2024, representing an increase of 6% compared with the prior reporting period.

Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s universities accounted for 10% of the 377 attacks worldwide, while the report also detailed attacks on universities, their students and professors in Gaza, Kenya, India, Yemen and other countries around the world.

The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack’s report Education Under Attack 2026 listed 55 countries, including France, Italy, Morocco, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States and Canada, where police forces had intervened on campuses, mostly against pro-Palestinian protestors occupying parts of campuses.

Last month, the Ottawa, Ontario-based polling company Abacus Data released The Precarity Mindset in the United States of America and Canada: Implications for Higher Education report that showed that the two countries are moving almost in lock step away from trust in and valuing higher education.

Only 18% of respondents in each country felt college or university education was “Definitely Worth It”. In Canada, that figure was five percentage points above the 13% who agreed that “Costs Now Outweigh the Benefits”, while in the US, almost the same percentage, 16%, said that higher education wasn’t worth the cost as the 18% who said it definitely was.

Eleven per cent of American respondents said the “System is Broken”, which means that, taken with the 13% who said costs outweigh the benefits, 24% of Americans have all but turned their backs on higher education.

More than a third in each country (37% in Canada and 35% in the US) now take a transactional view that “It depends on the programme and school”.

While overall trust in universities in the UK remains high, with 63% of respondents saying universities had a positive impact on Britain and only 6% saying they had a negative impact, the granular findings in University College London’s report, Shared Institutions: The public’s view on the role of universities in national and local life (released last October), were more nuanced. Eighty-one per cent of university graduates had a positive view of higher education but only 55% of non-university graduates did.

Fifty-five per cent of all respondents agreed that the 50% university graduate target set by Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 1999 should be scrapped. Almost half, 47%, agreed that universities offer too many low-quality or ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees.

Just over half of Britons agreed that international students are a net benefit to the country; less than a third of UK Reform respondents did.

In Australia, almost 40% of respondents to a study by the Australian National University released in April reported little trust in the nation’s universities, while a recent study found that 59% of Brazilians lack faith in their universities.

To counter these trends and the ideology embodied in US Vice-President JD Vance’s statement “Universities are the enemy”, Liviu Matei, who heads the School of Education, Communications & Society at King’s College London, points to the Magna Charta Universitatum (MCU).

The MCU’s authority does not come from the lances of the knights who forced King John’s namesake document, Magna Carta (which limited the king’s power and set England on a road, albeit a halting one, toward democracy) at Runneymede in 1215.

Rather, Matei explained to University World News, that the MCU “provides a way of thinking about how to build resilience in higher education during the present time, based on a very small set of values, which are supposed to serve in one way as an anchor to help universities to be resilient, stable, resist the new challenges.”

These values include academic freedom, university autonomy, faculty rights and the importance of open debate.

Looking forward to the conference, Matei added: “We have them defined. So the idea is, what do we do about them internally within the university? But also, how do we negotiate them in practice with external stakeholders and, in particular, with public authorities?”

Drawing on his experience as provost of Central European University when pressure from Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán forced the university to relocate from Budapest to Vienna, Matei says it is “important to form coalitions with those who can influence the general public and work with them”, but does that include working with Trump?

“No, you probably cannot work with Trump, and you don’t want to work with Trump because he would ask you to pay a price that you don't want to pay.”

Affordability’s impact on trust

Central to Matei’s presentation and those of Kathryn E Enke, vice-president of leadership and strategy at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and Jamil Salmi, the Moroccan-born former head of tertiary education at the World Bank, is the question of trust in and of universities. Among the issues Salmi will discuss is how the affordability crisis affects the public’s trust.

Salmi drew a line around the affordability crisis that dominates the English language media and that of the rest of the world. By virtue of its dominance in English language education and media ownership, the affordability crisis is almost always discussed in American terms – and then in terms of the fees at elite universities like Harvard and Stanford.

For the upcoming school year, the sticker price at Harvard for tuition, fees and living expenses, which no one but the very wealthy pay, is US$91,634.

The vast majority of American college and university students attend state universities where tuition and fees run US$38,548 for in-state students at the University of Michigan.

Still, the total owed by Americans who either graduated or merely attended universities is US$1.8 billion (an average of US$40,467).

“When we speak of student debt, we actually mean two different things,” says Salmi. “The US is an outlier because it affects the middle class. It’s affecting votes in the suburbs” (where elections are won or lost).

“Around the world the affordability crisis is preventing the poorest from accessing higher education. In Latin America, by and large, you still have large financial barriers. In China you have it because they have high fees for undergraduate students and limited student aid.” In countries like Brazil and Indonesia, where a large portion of higher education institutions are private-for-profit, the poor have difficulty accessing higher education, he says.

One of the recommendations in the AAC&U’s Trust Agenda released in June was that American colleges and universities should be more transparent about the actual cost of attending them.

Salmi will also address the growing rejection of science, which, he underscored, has different drivers in different parts of the world.

Attendees will know much about the Trump Administration’s war on scientific expertise and Robert F Kennedy Jr’s antivax stance. What’s likely to be new to many is that in parts of Pakistan science is “considered a Western thing” and that “extremists would kill health personnel giving polio vaccinations,” says Salmi.

He also pointed to the wildfires that have burnt to the gates of Bordeaux and threatened Madrid and noted that “for ideological reasons, people don’t want to think about the scientific reasons for the catastrophes that they face and the reasonable measures that should be taken regardless of ideology.”

For her part, Enke too deplores the attack on science by the American administration. But she will explain that, to some degree, the universities left themselves open to the Trump Administration’s overreach by not cultivating trust on the ground.

Universities and colleges exist to promote the public good. For example, she points to her state’s state university, the University of Minnesota, which was founded as an agricultural university, which by its very nature was closely tied to farmers.

Universities have, she says, become siloed, not just from each other – with the community college not speaking to the liberal arts college and vice versa, and neither speaking with the state university, even though they are all within a few blocks of each other – but from the communities they exist to serve.

By way of example, she spoke of her family’s knowledge about “rotating crops so that it cares for the earth and makes farming more sustainable” that, for lack of a better term, can be called “practical” knowledge as opposed to knowledge gained only through reading.

“I think one mistake we make is valuing one area of knowledge over another area of knowledge, and, in fact, if universities did a better job of valuing local knowledge and experience, they would be more connected to the communities they are located in” and, frankly, not look like a “colonising power” that believes, “we know what is needed in order to have a more advanced society, and the people who are here don’t.”

Such behaviour is self-defeating for, it fails to build the “strong interpersonal connections” needed to cultivate allies to help defend universities against the kind of assaults Trump’s Administration has launched.

Towards inclusive excellence]

Another issue that the keynote speakers will address is inclusion, for by restricting inclusion, they believe, universities will be breaking a promise now many decades old. Enke will explain how the AAC&U has called on colleges and universities to recommit to inclusive excellence – even as the Trump Administration continues its assault on inclusion.

Back in June, Jeremy C Young, AAC&U’s Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives, explained the Trust Agenda’s call for “inclusive excellence” includes “breaking down of barriers that keep students from succeeding, from accessing college and succeeding and completing college”.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are designed to address one set of barriers that focus on race, gender and identity related to student access and success.

“When it’s done well, that is, that's the focus. But those are not the only barriers that keep students from succeeding. There are also economic barriers, things like food and housing insecurity, a lack of tutoring or mentorship or advising,” Young told University World News.

For his part, Salmi noted how the advances in equity and inclusion – affirmative action, student financial aid, retention policies, DEI – that have been adopted by countries around the world, and even post-World War II consensus that higher education was good for everyone, have been reversed or are being reversed in the United States.

America’s Christian ideology, by which he meant America’s brand of Evangelicalism and Puritanism about, for example, gender, leads to what “we algorithmically see [as] a convergence of policies from Afghanistan, Iran and Florida,” he says.

Complexities behind trust building

Matei politely dissents from the view that trust is a direct function of town/gown links. There is no objective evidence to back this up, he says.

“When they talk about trust or distrust in universities, it is not something that is [formed] by building the relationship between the public and the university one-to-one. It’s a lot more complex than that.

“The public doesn’t read university reports from Cambridge or MIT or any other institution. They witness events like the infamous hearing of the three presidents in Washington.”

Or, he noted a few moments later, one could cite the example of the now infamous case of former University of Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor in the university’s history, who resigned from his position on 5 August and sadly took his own life nine days later after facing a social media and media storm over allegations of plagiarism, falsifying research and misrepresenting his academic biography, which many thought were fuelled by racism.

Cambridge opened an investigation, although previously allegations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis had been investigated and dismissed by Liverpool John Moores University.

“The university has thousands of channels of communication with the public. But at this point, this is the one that matters no matter what the university does or does not do.” The case “has already [had] a devastating effect” on the more than 1,000-year-old university”.

Nor has trust in universities in the UK been helped by contradictory messages from prime ministers of the same party. In 1990, Blair, who led a Labour government, told the House of Commons, Matei says: “The future of Britain’s economic competitiveness depends on Britain having the best educated workforce in the world. And, for that to happen, we need a target of 50% of the university-aged group to graduate from university.

“That’s what the public heard: this is how important university is,” says Matei.

These are the people, Matei explains, from whom the public gets its view of higher education and whether it delivers what it promises – and when they say it doesn’t, the public loses faith.

Gulf opened up by AI

Salmi will be raising another issue that flies in the face of the hype around AI. He’s concerned about AI undermining grading. But he’s even more concerned with what can be thought of as a phenomenological and epistemological gulf that AI has opened between people who came of age before AI and those who will grow up with it.

“You and I and the people we know,” he says, “knew [university life] before AI. What will happen when you have younger people who didn’t know [intellectual] life before AI? What kind of reasoning and critical thinking aspects will they miss? Or will it be different?” he will ask the attendees at the MCO in October.

* If you would like to take part in the Magna Charta Universitatum 2026, on 14 to 16 October, in Vilnius, Lithuania, please register here.