Yale University took a close look at the decline of trust in academia and concluded — refreshingly — that it has no one to blame but itself. That is, the special panel the school set up to consider the question found that US elite schools have earned the public’s contempt. Yes, the report fingers some not-so-controversial causes such as obscenely high tuition, utterly opaque rules for discounts on those bills and even more obscure admissions policies as factors in the collapse of confidence in higher education. But the panel saved the real fire for what everyone knows to be the...