Are College Accreditors the Next Assault on Academic Freedom?
As a candidate, President Trump said college accreditation would be his “secret weapon” for implementing his agenda.
One of the things that I think is being revealed by the flurry of attacks by the Trump administration on higher education is how many different points of vulnerability there are in terms of threats to the free operation of these institutions and the faculty, staff, and students who work there.
We’ve seen attacks on how institutions are funded and how they’re governed. We’ve seen a “Dear Colleague” letter that seemed deliberately designed to sow confusion over student rights and put institutions in a Catch-22 bind.
We now have a direct declaration to shut down the Department of Education, something that CDAF’s Tariq Habash points out is not exactly legal, but which will likely result in great harm.
Trump Can't Legally Dismantle the Department of Education
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One other area of potential vulnerability is at the level of institutional accreditation, a long-held boogeyman of right-wing critics of higher education, and something which appears to be in the sights of those who want to subjugate higher education to the views of the federal executive.
Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, recently published a piece at The Chronicle of Higher Education arguing the importance of independent accreditors to insulating institutions from political influence.
In the piece below, we’re pleased to share some of Bob’s additional thoughts about why and how this is an issue that those of us concerned about these assaults on academic freedom should be aware of. - John Warner
Are College Accreditors Next?
As a candidate, President Trump said college accreditation would be his “secret weapon” for implementing his agenda.
By Robert Shireman
The establishment of a college tuition benefit for soldiers returning from World War II battlefields was one of the most successful social policies in U.S. history, providing a purpose to millions of veterans and preparing many of them for the new middle class. At the same time, however, the money for tuition spurred thousands of naive or unscrupulous entrepreneurs to recruit vets into “colleges” and other training programs that turned out to provide little or no benefit to the students or their communities. The scandal was an embarrassment to Congress and to the Veterans Administration.
To assist in distinguishing legitimate from questionable institutions, the VA decided to tap into a list of college accrediting agencies that had been developed by the U.S. commissioner of education. The official 1952 list of accrediting agencies shows six regional university accreditors — the same big six that operate today but which are now national in scope — along with 22 professional and technical accreditors, from medical fields to bible schools to engineering. As federal funding to colleges expanded in the ensuing decades, both for research as well as for students’ tuition and other expenses, Congress continued to rely on accrediting agencies to vouch for quality. Today, more than 50 accreditors are federally recognized.
Beyond weeding out fly-by-night schools, the federal government’s use of private, voluntary accrediting bodies had another important benefit: the approach has helped to protect academic freedom by creating a shield against federal intrusion into the university curriculum. With accreditors at the front line, the feds don’t directly judge academic matters. Congress doubled down on this prophylactic in 1968 with a law, still on the books, prohibiting federal officials from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution.”
In his election campaign, Donald Trump pledged to turn this shield of federal accreditor recognition into a “secret weapon” to punish colleges that teach ideas he considers “anti-American.”
In a new Chronicle of Higher Education essay, I point out that Trump’s incursion into accreditors’ domain began in 2020, with the adoption of a regulation now being used by Christian Nationalists. The rule requires an accrediting agency to set aside its own standards — a commitment to science, or evidence, for example — in favor of a college’s religious-based belief. This may be only the beginning. The demand for “balance” in the Columbia University curriculum may portend broader requirements that colleges, say, provide equal time to biblical creation. After all, Trump owes his political success to white Christian Nationalists who view him as a modern-day Cyrus, an unlikely but genuine divine vessel to establish a Christian America. Or Trump may push more personal causes, such as continuing to press his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
It remains to be seen how accreditation policy will develop in Trump II. One hopeful sign is that a Trump appointee at the U.S. Department of Education suggested (prior to the confirmation of the Secretary) that the Administration would be focused on recognizing new accreditors, not necessarily harassing the current ones. Further, some conservatives, not just organizations like AAUP and PEN America, are beginning to raise concerns about Trump’s assault on university independence. Perhaps a left-right, secular-religious coalition can be formed to support the institutional and academic freedom that has allowed higher education’s creativity to thrive in America.
The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
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