Universities must work hard to gain public trust, IAU told

Facing unprecedented challenges and a growing public trust deficit, universities need to return to core principles of equity and inclusiveness, truth, social responsibility and student-centredness, according to global tertiary education expert and former coordinator of tertiary education at the World Bank Jamil Salmi.

Speaking at the opening plenary of the International Association of Universities (IAU) International Conference 2025 in Kigali, Rwanda, which brought together more than 200 experts from 56 countries from around the world from 21 to 23 October under the theme “Building Trust in Higher Education”, Salmi acknowledged the need to rebuild trust in universities if they are to remain relevant in a world facing unprecedented change.

“People are challenging universities on several fronts – that they are elitist, too expensive, and do not prepare students well for the world of work,” Salmi told University World News on the sidelines of the conference in Kigali.

“So there is a mismatch between the programmes offered and what the labour market needs, especially in a world of very rapid technological change. Then you have the challenge of fraud. Not all universities are behaving well, so you have many elements of fraud,” Salmi noted.
Among the other contributors to the conference, IAU president Andrew Deeks stressed that universities should work together to reinforce the value of universities to society.

University of Ghana Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo said it was important for leaders in the higher education space to do a lot of engagement, rather than assume that people know the reason for universities’ existence.

Dr Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola, the vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos in Nigeria, emphasised the need for universities to have clear vision and well-defined policies and be open to a “rethink” of higher education.

Speaking in a plenary session titled “Trust and Distrust in an Age of Turmoil”, Salmi agreed that at the same time that universities are faced with an erosion of trust, they are struggling with underfunding, digital transition challenges, technological disruption from AI and automation, shrinking democracies, and environmental instability.

Sustained elitism ‘fuelling mistrust’

He told the IAU audience that sustained elitism among higher education institutions around the world explained some of the public mistrust towards them.

Salmi pointed to Oxford and Cambridge universities in the UK, where first-generation students made up only 18% of students, while that proportion nationwide was 48%. He said in elite US colleges, there were still more students from the top 1% income group than the bottom 60%.

In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were among the most selective institutions in the world, selecting only one out of 100 candidates, while in France, the grandes écoles still existed to cater for the elites.

Another reason for the mistrust was the unaffordability of higher education, which translated into high levels of student debt. In the US, where outstanding student debt amounts to US$1.8 trillion, 43 million students had outstanding debt which averaged US$40,000 per person, he said. In the UK, outstanding student debt at the end of March 2025 stood at £267 billion, with average debt being £53,000 (US$70,000).

Salmi said that the high cost of universities was also a feature of other countries across the globe such as China, Brazil, Japan, Chile, Mexico and South Korea.

In countries such as Chile and South Africa, the situation had prompted widespread student protests which had succeeded in challenging the status quo around fee-paying higher education.

Job market relevance urged

Salmi also pointed in his presentation – as a contributing factor in mistrust – to public perceptions that university programmes are not relevant to the jobs market – a key grievance behind the Arab Spring protests that started in Tunisia and moved on to Morocco, Egypt, and other Arab cities in 2010.

“Among the many demands of the students were not only freedom and democracy but also jobs. Graduate unemployment is very high in many countries,” he said.

Even more recently, he noted, there were troubles in Serbia, Bangladesh, and Nepal. The government fell in Bangladesh and Nepal two months ago. At the heart of protesters’ demands was the issue of graduate unemployment.

“There seems to be a big mismatch between what traditional universities offer and what the labour market under the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is demanding,” he noted.

Another challenge in some countries and in some universities is the high level of fraud and corruption.

Culture wars hurting universities

Referencing the culture wars assaulting universities in many parts of the world, Salmi said: “Political parties or governments, based on ideological or religious objections, are banning certain groups from accessing universities. The worst possible case is Afghanistan, where today half of the population – all women – are banned from education,” he said.

He referred to the US, where he described a “counterattack against people of colour, indigenous groups, and the LGBT community”.

“As a result, we see censorship. The US federal government even published a list of 199 banned words, including ‘women’, ‘gender’, ‘equity’, and ‘climate change’,” he said.

Salmi said reports from Scholars at Risk paint a “dark picture of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the rejection of scientific facts” – and not only in countries conventionally regarded as authoritarian.

Return to ‘core principles’

Salmi urged the universities facing these unprecedented challenges and a public trust deficit to return to “core principles” of equity and inclusiveness, truth, social responsibility and student-centredness, while also focusing on student outcomes.

“Universities must be both excellent and inclusive, embrace lifelong learning, focus on active, project-based, and creative education, and prepare students to distinguish between real and fabricated information.”

Salmi noted that the fundamental mission of universities is to question dogma, encourage critical thinking and respect scientific evidence.

“To rebuild trust, we need to focus on being student-centred institutions, being centred on what students actually learn and can do. That’s key,” he said.

Encouraging critical thought was particularly important in the context of artificial intelligence.

“AI often gives wrong solutions because you haven’t asked the right question, or even when you do, AI will not always admit that it doesn’t know,” he said.

“So it’s very important for young people today, especially considering the time they spend on social media, to be able to judge whether what they hear is just a statement, an opinion, or a fact supported by evidence. That’s the core mission of universities: to develop critical thinking,” he added.

Salmi said the social mission of universities, working towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and promoting positive values about democracy, solidarity and tolerance, was critical. Universities needed to train students to be “both good professionals and good citizens if we want to rebuild democracy”, he said.

Embrace good leadership

To ensure universities remain relevant and are able to rebuild trust, they need to embrace good leadership and foster collaboration across different disciplines, he noted.

“You can be a university rector, vice-chancellor, or president and not be a good leader. You can order, impose, or decree something, but that doesn’t work. What works is inspiring your entire community of students, professors and administrators towards a common goal,” he said, challenging university leaders to lead by example.

“The role of leaders is key, and that’s why having this audience of university presidents from the IAU is so important, because they are the leaders in their respective institutions and countries.

“They can ensure that their university is open-minded, inclusive, focused on evidence and the needs of society, and engaged in dialogue with political groups, civil society, NGOs, municipalities, industry and all stakeholders,” he said.

“To build trust is to listen to society and reach out to explain in plain, easy-to-understand language what universities stand for. Not to speak jargon that nobody understands, but to explain the world and respond to people’s questions,” he concluded.

He said universities are places where people by and large collaborate, but across universities too often there is hostility due to competition for resources or students. “Universities don’t realise that it is much more effective and productive to work together,” he said.

Engage with stakeholders

Like Salmi, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, in a later plenary, emphasised the importance of institutional leadership in building trust in universities but also in science.

“Science really is about research; it’s about scholarship,” she told University World News.

“And so it was important that we discuss these matters, look at the issues generating this kind of mistrust, and see how we can work towards restoring trust in science and in the higher education enterprise generally.”

“It behoves us to engage with people outside of the higher education space – prospective students, parents, ministries, government agencies, the private sector, and most importantly, the communities which we are deemed to serve,” she said.

Also sharing the opening plenary platform with Salmi, Dr Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola, the vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos, said: “In the future, there is a lot of work to be done [and] a lot of innovation and people will do that naturally. We have not been given enough credit for knowledge that is generated outside universities,” she said.

“There are ways we can improve education, and in terms of research, universities must begin to champion how we do it for higher education. We have to rethink higher education,” she said.

Co-plenary panellist Dr Aishath Shehenaz Adam, vice-chancellor of the Maldives National University, said it was important to prepare students for excellence and a complex future.

“I think we have to change the education system we have in our universities and ensure we are raising and training students to excel in their areas of specialisation. But we must also take responsibility for the education that shapes all the decisions they will have to make,” she stated.

In his closing remarks to the conference, IAU president Andrew Deeks – who is also vice-chancellor and president of Murdoch University, Australia – echoed Salmi’s comments on the value of collaboration as opposed to competition and urged participants to recognise the value of institutional cooperation.

“Universities should recognise that, together, we as a university community can support each other through these difficulties and reinforce the value of universities to society, to the future of our students, our young people and our older people, and that working together we are much stronger than apart,” he said.