From Mike Budd, United Faculty of Florida and Higher Education Labor United
Governors in Old Confederacy States Authorize Their Own Accreditation Cartel
Governors and other politicians in at least seven southern states are reportedly making plans to replace the current accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), with a new, politically conservative accrediting body, the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE). At least seven university systems in the states of the Old Confederacy have signed on to the plans. These include the State University System of Florida, the Texas A&M University System, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina System, the University of South Carolina system, the University of Tennessee System, and potentially four systems in Louisiana.
Through AAUP, UCW and HELU, faculty and other workers in higher education are organizing to counter this blatant politicization of the college and university accreditation process.
One of the leaders of the effort to impose political priorities over educational ones, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, has called current accreditors “an educational cartel.” He and other right-wing politicians in the south and elsewhere apparently want to replace the current independent system with their own cartel. Given the current conservative political control of these seven and other states and the federal government, the authoritarian takeover of higher education and its accreditation in seven southern states is likely to spread to other states. It would facilitate their attempts to curb academic freedom; politicize university research and teaching; suppress independent, enlightened or “woke” thought and action, diversity of all kinds, and the inclusion of historically marginalized groups, in the classroom and the curriculum; and obstruct the production of new knowledge, art and understanding through faculty research and creative work.
Higher Education Accreditation and Federal Power: A Brief History
Until World War II, the federal government largely allowed the then relatively small higher education sector to regulate itself through accrediting commissions established by the institutions themselves. But in the wake of the two huge GI Bills of 1944 and 1952, which enabled millions of veterans to access postsecondary education for the first time, Congressional investigations revealed widespread waste, fraud and abuse in the variety of new federal aid programs, mostly among the thousands of mostly fly-by-night trade, commercial and for-profit schools that had sprung up to take advantage of the new federal funds. As Congress sought to eliminate the abuses by predatory “free market” actors without imposing direct government control of the rapidly growing higher education industry, it turned the growing accreditation agencies and commissions, whether focused on whole institutions or on professional fields, into gatekeepers of the burgeoning federal aid programs. To receive federal aid, institutions and professional programs had to be accredited.
Since those gatekeeping accreditors now had indirect, quasi-state regulatory authority over the disbursement of public funds, they often came under the influence of well-funded private individuals and corporations more interested in their own private profit than in quality education for the public good. This public good was now expanding to include previously excluded or marginalized groups like women, African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and others. When these previously excluded or invisible groups began to attend universities and participate in larger numbers in university life, beginning in the nineteen sixties and seventies, they increasingly organized to demand their inclusion and visibility in the courses and educational priorities of the universities, priorities that would be given tacit approval and legitimation by the accreditation bodies.
Thus, the previously sleepy accreditation bodies, independent of the state and responsive primarily to faculty and administrators across institutions, accrued power away from the public spotlight. But this power could be relatively invisible only as long as the changing values and priorities of those self-regulating university and college institutions was relatively uncontroversial, not clashing with powerful private interests.
Controversy became public with Ronald Reagan’s right-wing attacks on the University of California in the sixties, demonizing student protestors and faculty scholars. In multiple ways these faculty and students challenged the orthodox Cold War culture of militarism, nationalism, patriarchy, racism, xenophobia and homophobia, still strong today. These challenges and controversies continue throughout the U.S. and around the world today, including in the states of the Old Confederacy.
As the most conservative and reactionary (seeking an imaginary past) part of the U.S., the states of the Old Confederacy are not coincidentally the location of this first challenge to the relative autonomy and independence from state control of higher education accreditation. Although the U.S. center-right has come to dominate U.S. politics since the seventies, higher education remains relatively independent and liberal (broad, tolerant, enlightened). Frustrated in their political initiatives by the unpopularity and antidemocratic character of their ideas and policies, the well-funded and -organized U.S. right has increasingly turned to voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, mass incarceration and imitations of illiberal regimes in Hungary, Turkey, Israel, Russia and elsewhere. This is the relevant historical context for their attacks on the relative independence of civil society institutions like higher education accreditation bodies. Abandoning talk of democratic freedom in the abstract, MAGA political leaders like Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and North Carolina state legislators claim a much narrower, more authoritarian, hierarchical and predatory version of freedom. That version centers the freedom to oppress and exploit, to dominate and hunt other humans, and resembles that of their political forbears, the nineteenth century slavers of the Old Confederacy and their northern enablers and allies, the industrialists and Wall Street bankers.
Independent higher education accreditors, despite their flaws, are among the many institutions that block the authoritarians’ path to more autocratic power. The new conservative southern Commission for Public Higher Education is likely to facilitate waste, fraud and abuse in the use of federal funds for private profit in higher education. More importantly, it will try to centralize a weaponized accreditation system across the whole southeast U.S., forcing universities to obey direct government orders, censor teaching and research, and systematically re-marginalize or exclude those groups with recent access, using false claims about the evils of D.E.I. and wokeness.
New Developments: Unions and Labor Organizations in the South and Elsewhere
This authoritarian and reactionary takeover is accelerating ongoing faculty organizing in southern and other states through unions and other labor organizations. In the south generally, laws and regulations weaken worker power and sometimes even bar collective bargaining despite workers’ increasing desire to join unions. But given the growing assaults by conservative politicians on all workers and others, higher education faculty (part time, full time, tenure track or not, student workers, postdocs) increasingly recognize themselves as workers and organize for democratic representation through unions or independent labor advocacy organizations.
The venerable American Association of University Professors (established 1915), growing in membership and new chapters and with new leadership, increasingly supplements its vital traditional role of advocate for academic freedom, tenure protections and shared governance with more attention to grassroots campus organizing and collective bargaining, to build faculty power, and to articulate a stronger public voice for higher education. Too often our higher education managers have abdicated their role to be that voice, and faculty are stepping up, unevenly but persistently, into a new role as defenders and advocates for the public good in higher education.
United Campus Workers, affiliated with the progressive national union the Communications Workers of America, helps higher ed workers organize for advocacy and an institutional and public voice, especially in states that lack a legal and political framework for collective bargaining and worker advocacy and power. With a wall-to-wall strategy to organize all campus workers, UCW focuses on southern and a few other states.
More than a dozen major unions and many smaller ones help higher education workers organize, and virtually all of those unions have only a small minority of their workers in higher education. This fragmentation, plus the disorganization of many higher ed workers, especially in states less friendly to unions, creates the need for a higher education labor movement organizing around issues distinctive to the whole higher education sector through many unions and all its workers. Thus, the growth of Higher Education Labor United, a labor coalition which aims to organize all higher education workers (student workers, staff, faculty) wall to wall and coast to coast. The politicization of the higher education accrediting process in the south and beyond is exactly the kind of issue that AAUP, UCW and HELU, with their shared focus on higher ed issues within the larger labor movement, can tackle through cooperation and solidarity.
Contact for inquiries, press: Brian Allen: ballen@aaup.org; Mike Budd: mbudd44@gmail.com