Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have finally finished nominating all 18 members of a panel that reviews accrediting groups. And the stark divisions among those named to the panel does not bode well for a unified or harmonious approach to its task when it begins meeting again this year after a two-year hiatus.
The panel, called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or Naciqi, is charged with advising the secretary of education on whether to approve an accreditor as a gatekeeper of federal education money. Colleges must have the approval of a federally recognized accreditor in order for its students to receive federal financial aid.
Congress overhauled Naciqi in its 2008 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, increasing its membership from 15 to 18. The law also changed how members would be chosen: Instead of having the Education Department name all the members, six are now appointed by the U.S. House of Representatives and six by the Senate, with Democrats and Republicans picking the same number in each chamber, and six members are named by the department.
The changes were meant in part to make Naciqi more ideologically balanced, after years of clashes with institutions and accreditors who accused the panel of following the conservative political leanings of the Bush administration and the education secretary at the time, Margaret Spellings.
But under the new system for selecting the panel’s members, ideological balance could easily lead to the kind of partisan gridlock that has plagued Congress since the 2008 elections.
Congressional Republicans, naming a third of the committee’s members, mostly chose panelists from the business world or for-profit colleges but no one currently serving at a traditional nonprofit institution. The GOP appointments include Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, who served on a previous version of Naciqi and was one of the most outspoken advocates for colleges to show greater evidence of student achievement and for accreditors to require such evidence in their standards.
Republicans also named two leaders of proprietary colleges to the committee: Arthur E. Keiser, chancellor of Keiser University, and William J. Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix.
Congressional Democrats, by contrast, chose four of their six members from the ranks of public colleges, along with the former chancellor of the University of California at Davis.
The Education Department named the only private, nonprofit college representatives to the panel: the provost of Emory University, a professor from the Howard University School of Law, and a student from Occidental College.
The list of all 18 appointments can be found on the Web site of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.
