Trust in academia is at a low. Can Writing Seminar help?

Writing is facing an existential threat from new technologies and waning attention spans. And the problems we face as we surrender our syntactic skills range far beyond the imperiled survival of the humanities or even losing the process of “critical inquiry” through writing that the Princeton Writing Program touts. That vision depicts writing as a tool for personal development, but writing is not all about the author — it’s also about the audience.

Academia has a PR problem, and no amount of insular critical inquiry is going to solve it. Princeton’s Writing Seminars focus on crafting papers fit for scholarly discourse, often placing obscure topics in esoteric frameworks. So we’re taught more about the research development process than we are about outlining and crafting effective phrases, paragraphs, or pages. Writing Seminars should live up to their name and teach us not just to solve thorny research problems but also to effectively communicate our solutions through clear and — perhaps more importantly — stylistically compelling prose.

The current Writing Seminar system successfully structures first years’ development as researchers and critical thinkers. Through its emphasis on primary source evidence prior to thesis development and its zest for multi-draft processes, the program encourages first-years to craft an argument through writing, revising, starting over, complaining, and eventually submitting something that they might be proud of. 

But while the “Writing Lexicon” distributed to all students at the start of the Seminar features terms like “Conventions,” “Mechanics,” and “Style,” we focus more on terms like “Motive” and “Method.” We are perhaps encouraged to revisit a paragraph that lacks evidence or to refine our “empirical motive” to prove that our theses are worth something (at least to the scholarly community), but it is rare to hear that our syntax or style need to be sharpened or simply more interesting.

Writing Seminar papers don’t need to be the next bestseller or the average American’s beach reading. But because Writing Seminars do not adequately emphasize compelling, accessible prose, they create researchers and future academics who are not well prepared to communicate with the public, instead perpetuating academia’s ivory tower.

According to a 2026 Gallup poll, just 38 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, and 25 percent have “very little” or “none.” Percentages have declined among both Democrats (now at 50 percent confidence) and Republicans (now 23 percent) since last year. At its best, higher education promotes intellectualism that encourages rigorous debate of ideas; when Americans instead trust skewed media or uninformed influencers, viewpoint discrimination thrives and truth becomes less valued. But Americans cannot learn to trust academia if academia does not first learn how to communicate with them.

In May, I spoke on the “Opinionated” podcast about the public trust issues facing higher education raised in the Yale Report. “What’s the point of generating knowledge if you’re not effectively disseminating it?” I asked, before commending Yale for taking a look in the mirror and considering why public trust is declining.

Regaining trust and reaching more Americans may not require the Yale Report’s more drastic recommendations like reforms to admissions policies or hiring practices, but it might involve an intentional communication strategy. Perhaps we must instead recognize that some audiences are not captivated by academics’ work because we are not speaking their language, not because they are anti-intellectuals.

Op-eds and research papers have criticized the inaccessibility of academia for years. As public trust continues to decline, Princeton needs to teach fledgling academics to understand and consider potential audiences in its curricular requirements rather than sustaining a struggling strategy. 

It may seem like I’m making a better argument for introducing a Communications and Public Relations distribution requirement than for refocusing the first-year Writing Seminar. But I’m not suggesting that Princetonians need to learn how to put their research into short-form videos (although academic influencers like the linguist @etymologynerd are probably reaching a broader audience than most researchers). Rather, I suggest a more modest reform to Princeton’s only core curricular requirement. 

Like any good editor, Writing Seminar instructors should teach about and give feedback on prose, word choice, syntax, and style, not just on a submission’s thesis, evidence, and contributions to the scholarly conversation. Seminars may focus on the research process, but they need not sacrifice other equally important aspects of writing. Even without reforming the entire program, seminars could include shorter exercises that focus on crafting hooks and digestible yet sophisticated argumentation. 

By learning to make our writing more gripping, we may not add a single percentage point to public trust in higher education — at least not in the short term. But we will become more effective spokespeople for the value of our research at a time when such value faces extreme scrutiny.

Ian Rosenzweig thinks we have some work to do to save academia’s reputation. He is an assistant Opinion editor from Bryn Mawr, Pa who you can reach at rosenzweig@dailyprincetonian.com.