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What stands in Trump’s way? The federal law establishing the Department of Education prohibits federal interference in curricular matters. That federal law would change, however, if the department is eliminated. Another obstacle is the First Amendment: If the administration were to directly attack accreditors’ opinions or academic perspectives, they would expose themselves to legal challenges. The administration could respond to this by claiming a national-security concern (say, holding that diversity, equity, and inclusion are part of a Marxist threat to America). Or administration officials could fabricate other reasons for revoking the official recognition of an accreditor (say, that its staff was not expert enough, or that it failed to consistently enforce a standard).
The first test of Trump’s approach comes in the next few weeks as the Department of Education considers the fate of an accreditor that conservatives love to hate, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, or SACSCOC.
The radical right-wing activist Max Eden, whose roadmap for destroying America’s colleges Trump seems to be following, salivates at the idea of the Education Department using its power to destroy SACSCOC. Eden claims that the accreditor “has been perhaps the most offensive and pro-DEI of all the accreditors.” For that claim he provides no real evidence, because there is none: SACSCOC is the only one of the six major college accreditors that doesn’t mention standards for diversity, equity, or inclusion. The likely genesis of his ire is that SACSCOC investigated whether Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, violated their standards protecting institutions from political meddling.
In the Florida cases, SACSCOC found no violations. But conservative pundits hate the accreditor anyway. When I asked one of them why, given that SACSCOC doesn’t have a DEI standard, he assured me there were reasons, but he could not remember what they were. Last month, the accreditor appeared before the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the bipartisan federal advisory committee that oversees accreditors. (I am a Democratic appointee to the committee, but I do not speak for the committee.) Under my questioning, Belle S. Wheelan, president of SACSCOC, confirmed that her agency has no DEI standard for colleges.
The purpose of the agency’s appearance before the advisory committee was completely unrelated to DEI or to the Florida investigations, and SACSCOC received — by unanimous bipartisan vote — a clean bill of health. The Education Department’s political appointees, however, are not required to follow the recommendations of the department’s staff or of NACIQI. A denial of SACSCOC’s request to renew its recognition, if the education secretary, Linda McMahon, takes that route, would be an outrageous and costly move, the first steps of a sad and crippling descent into tyranny. We should know the outcome by early June.
The idea that more accreditors are needed has been a logical outgrowth of the Heritage Foundation’s dubious claim that federal reliance on accreditation is unconstitutional or establishes “a cartel.” Far from being a cartel, the federal recognition of accreditors is more like the Wild West. Anyone can start an accrediting agency and become recognized if they meet various governance and procedural requirements. The Education Department already recognizes more than 50 accrediting agencies, with the majority of them granting schools and colleges access to federal financial aid.
The “Big Six,” the largest accreditors and traditional agencies for major colleges, were formerly regional but now are available to any college nationwide. An institution that does not like the allopathic approach to medical care can be accredited by agencies emphasizing osteopathic, naturopathic, herbal, or acupuncture approaches. There are many nursing accreditors, and separate accreditors for art, dance, and massage therapy. Montessori teaching has a separate accreditor to ensure that certain educational principles (like “cosmic education”) are heeded.
The Big Six do not have narrow constraints. They all have traditions of taking a college’s mission, religious or otherwise, into consideration in assessing whether an institution meets their general expectations. SACSCOC, despite a general commitment to rational thought and evidence-based science, accredits institutions that believe that everything in the Bible is true, or insist that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, or that all living organisms were created in their current form in just six days. The new accreditors being promoted by conservatives may go on to earn federal recognition, but that would not break a “cartel” — it would simply make the Wild West a little wilder.
At the heart of the looming accreditation war is Christian nationalism. Influential in the GOP’s approach to education reform, Christian nationalists don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs. The process has already begun. Among the regulations that Betsy DeVos enacted in 2020 was a requirement that an accreditor must set aside its own standards to accommodate religious beliefs. The major accreditors have always provided a level of flexibility to accommodate religious orthodoxy, but the accreditor always had the final say.
DeVos’s regulation changed that. In 2021 the Higher Learning Commission, the nation’s largest accreditor, placed Southwest Baptist University, in Missouri, on probation in part because of strict requirements placed on faculty as to what can be taught and discussed. Rather than insisting that the university eliminate the restrictions or seek a different accreditor, the commission now had to relent. Southwest Baptist is able to punish or fire faculty members who stray from a radical Christian worldview, including opposition to homosexuality, while at the same time telling prospective students and faculty that it is accredited by the same agency as respected colleges like the Universities of Chicago and of Notre Dame.
The second Trump administration could go further in this direction. Christopher F. Rufo, the leading conservative critic of DEI, started his campaign as an organization committed to promoting intelligent design. It’s easy to imagine this administration asking accreditors to demonstrate that they promote “balance” in college curricula, giving equal time and credibility to creationism.
This Congress could be on board. Legislation adopted by the House education panel last year would prohibit recognized accreditors from requiring adherence to any ideological beliefs or viewpoints — unless they are religion-based. If that bill were to become law, an accreditor’s commitment to “scientific reasoning” or “critical analysis” and “logical thinking” — all real examples from accreditor standards — could be prohibited, while supernatural beliefs connected to a religion could be allowed.
Pressure on accreditors could also come about more subtlety. It might not happen through an early high-profile revocation of an accreditor’s recognition, but rather through the Education Department staffers opening an inquisition into an accreditor based on anything they find potentially amiss. They can do this without anyone but the accrediting agency knowing. If the agency falls into line — making changes to its policies or changing a decision — the interaction is hidden from public view. The current staff who handle accreditation at the Education Department have a great deal of integrity. But will they keep their jobs amid the department’s cuts and be willing to stand up to a president who views them as part of the “deep state”?
President Trump is punitive toward those who do not pledge their loyalty to him and his policies. If the responsibility for assessing college quality rested directly with the federal government, or if we were to be left with only the accrediting agencies that were willing to carry out his wishes, Trump would undoubtedly turn off the spigot of federal money to a college that employs a leader or faculty member who challenges him or his ideas.
An education researcher who worked in Hungary in 2021-22 described to me the repressive atmosphere when discussing public affairs at universities: “Academics routinely cast a glance over their shoulder to see who was listening and whether it was safe to speak. Self-censorship in public spaces was the rule.” A higher-education system that fears government retaliation will not make America great.
