Mike Budd, United Faculty of Florida and HELU delegate
As the Trump administration’s violent assaults on every part of American democracy meet increasing resistance, its attempted takeover of higher education, including through little-known but vital institutions of college and university accreditation, is also encountering growing resistance. Faculty, students and other campus workers organized through the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers Higher Education Division (AFT), United Campus Workers – CWA (UCW) and Higher Education Labor United (HELU) are leading the resistance in order to keep accreditors independent.
In the states of the Old Confederacy the political right has rolled out the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), a new conservative regional accrediting body they want to replace the previous independent accreditor, SACSCCOC or the “Southern Association,” one of the long-established independent regional higher ed accrediting agencies. Recently, an informal group of faculty leaders from southern states has grown under the leadership of a changing national AAUP and its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. Representatives from this growing faculty group have met with Cameron Howell and another representative of CPHE, with predictably indeterminate results.
The Right wants accreditors to do its work in higher ed
The right likely sees CPHE as a vanguard of conservative accreditors that can spread across the U.S., nationalizing conservative southern higher ed policies as President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” nationalized conservative white supremacist southern politics beginning in the late sixties and early seventies. Even more revealing, the last time southern lawmakers wanted to dismantle independent accreditation of higher ed was during the civil rights era, when they were trying to preserve racial segregation in southern colleges and universities. From slavery and the Confederacy to Jim Crow to today, conservatives and white supremacists have opposed truly public education systems, including higher education, and to this end they have sought to replace independent higher ed accreditors or regulators with politicized ones. This parallels their efforts to politicize k-12 public education through privatization, de facto resegregation, control of local school boards, school vouchers, and legislation hostile to public schools, teachers and teachers unions.
CPHE policies have been proposed by the right wing Heritage Foundation, supported by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and powerful politicians in North Carolina and other southern states, and increasingly financed by millions in grants from Trump’s Education Department and states like Florida. These policies, now law in several MAGA-dominated states, include the familiar, deliberately vague and thus weaponized anti-DEI prohibitions; demands for “intellectual diversity” that censor the teaching and research of thousands of faculty scholars and artists; the near-complete exclusion of faculty from university governance; and the destructive imposition of political ideology on the production of new knowledge and creative activity, the most important public good of the modern university.
But CPHE is designed to seem uncontroversial, to fly under the radar of potential opponents by trying to hide its attempted politicization of colleges and universities with the often boring and technocratic language of traditional independent accrediting bodies. Whereas Ron DeSantis said the quiet part out loud in his press conference rolling out CPHE in June 2024, denouncing “wokeness” to his MAGA base and demanding political orthodoxy in Florida, the more technocratic bosses running the University of North Carolina and shepherding CPHE toward wider public acquiescence prefer the slippery and sleep-inducing language of bureaucracy. The CPHE website is full of alarming authoritarian proposals tucked neatly within provisions that could be lifted from conventional independent accreditors.
Why are accreditation bodies so important to the public purposes of U.S. higher ed?
Though these agencies are obscure even to most in higher education, since the nineteen fifties they have been certified by the federal government (more recently through the Department of Education) as gatekeepers of federal financial aid, thus as guarantors of academic quality to students, faculty, employers and the public. This arrangement enables colleges and universities in the U.S. to receive millions in federal funds without which they would close or contract to pre-WWII size. Thus crucially, the independence of higher education in the U.S. from political and government interference rests largely on the independence of these accrediting bodies, sometimes described as “the plumbing of the U.S. higher education system.” These bodies mediate among opposing political-economic institutions and forces, allowing the institutions they accredit to operate relatively independent of direct political control, to self-regulate through accreditation.
However, since the U.S. right has never accepted the political independence of higher ed accrediting bodies or other regulatory agencies such as the EPA or the NLRB, conservatives constantly try to undermine these institutions of civil society. Sometimes they even attack them directly, as President Donald Trump has done with the Federal Reserve and other independent federal agencies. And conservative politicians have often promoted policies that allow bogus, predatory colleges and universities to sell unwary students on borrowing large sums through federally-guaranteed loan programs to pay for educations that are largely worthless both as education and as the currently-fashionable “return on investment”.
Students, parents, employers and higher education workers all depend in different ways on higher ed accrediting agencies for independent and reliable judgments about academic quality and professional standards. Only in this way can a higher ed industry that receives billions in federal aid and influences so many lives be allowed to regulate itself. The self-regulation of our colleges and universities through independent accreditors, a system without which our higher education system would collapse from a lack of public trust and accountability, is entirely dependent on independence from political interference by both federal and state government leaders.