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 real problem: “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education,” especially in a climate of “political bias and self-censorship.”

While emphasizing Yale’s commitment to free speech, the report even confronted the university’s tendency to “exclude conservative intellectual traditions.”

The issue of “ideological conformity” on a campus where Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 among faculty, the committee admits, has made the university seem an “intellectual and ideological echo chamber, out of touch with the American nation.”

This is damning language coming from the heart of elite academia, and contrasts with the defensive, self-righteous posturing heard from schools like Harvard, which rejected federal demands for an assessment of “viewpoint diversity” on campus.

Yale’s report is also candid about the problem of “non-academic administrative” bloat, warning that institutional hiring practices are so murky that it’s impossible to tell “what share of its resources is dedicated to core academic functions, and what share is not.”

The Yale report isn’t perfect. It doesn’t directly address DEI, racial quotas in admissions, how critical race theory infests the curriculum or the documented surge in antisemitism at Yale since the Oct. 7 attack.

But it does encourage Yale to step back from its grandiose vision of “improving the world” and fostering a “diverse community” and refocus its mission on the “dissemination of knowledge.”

Getting back to academic basics would signal a return to sanity and at least a partial rejection of the left’s demand that campuses serve foremost as vehicles for political indoctrination.

Of course, setting Yale and the rest of the Ivies straight means beating back those who profit from the bloat or prosper thanks to the rigid conformity — but owning up to the decay is a promising start.