The last decade in America has been marked by falling confidence in higher education and politicized attacks on academic institutions. But what is driving these growing negative perceptions and what can be done about them?
In a public talk at Caltech on May 26, political scientist Arthur Lupia (PhD '91) explored why trust has been lost between universities and society and how to rebuild it. The event was part of the Banks-McKelvey Memorial Lecture series, which brings important figures in the social sciences to campus to address new and important questions.
"There's a lot of uncertainty, but I think there's opportunity as well," said Lupia, who is the vice president for research and innovation and the Gerald R. Ford Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. "The reason that society supports organizations like ours at the scale that they do is because of the promise that we can do things that improve people's lives."
Lupia's research explores how people make decisions and form or break coalitions in complex political environments. In recent years, he has been investigating trends in US public confidence in science.
"Confidence has declined in every civic institution, but the decline in higher education or science is actually much less than most other sectors," said Lupia, who has held a wide range of leadership positions in science-focused institutions, including as assistant director of the National Science Foundation and co-chair of the Subcommittee on Open Science for the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. "A significant reason that confidence is falling is there's actually a huge consensus in the US about what [scientists] should be doing and a falling consensus on whether we're actually doing it."
For centuries, universities and scientists held a monopoly on information, Lupia argued. But technology—namely the internet and AI—has caused a massive shift in the information marketplace.
"We're not the only experts in town anymore; just go on Facebook, there are experts on everything," he said. "The thing that society is asking us to do is not to be content creators—because a lot of organizations can create content now, and AI is just going to expand that—but to validate knowledge in a way that only universities can. And that's an incredible thing."
Lupia said that because the way that people consume information has changed, scientists and academics must leverage the tools they know, such as the scientific method, to help answer the question: Why should I trust universities? He believes that with better transparency, communication, and engagement, higher education can win back trust and show the value of its unique position in the world to help improve lives.
"The one thing that universities can do that the private sector can't is look at the questions we can interrogate by convening with purpose, by bringing together subject-matter experts and students," Lupia said. "We can ask crazy questions over long time horizons and weird counterfactuals. We have to justify our choice of topics a little more rigorously than in the past, but there's a huge lane for universities to do that and great demand."
A full recording of Lupia's lecture is available on Caltech's YouTube page.
The Banks-McKelvey Memorial Lecture series honors the research and teaching of two late Caltech faculty who made seminal contributions to political economics. Jeffrey S. Banks (PhD '86) was a professor of political science from 1997 to 2000 who made important contributions to game theory and the politics of voting. Richard D. McKelvey (Banks's advisor) was the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Political Science and director of the William D. Hacker Social Science Experimental Laboratory at the time of his death in 2002. During his years at Caltech (1979–2001), he made fundamental contributions to voting theory, game theory, social choice theory, experimental political science, and computational economics. The series is made possible by a gift from Howard E. Jessen (BS '46).