The left has thoroughly infiltrated American education, using it to shape the thinking of students — to accept collectivistic beliefs and reject our traditional values. That infiltration naturally includes all institutions adjacent to our schools and colleges, including accreditation agencies.
In today’s Martin Center article, Anne Hendershott explains how accreditation helps to promote leftist ideology.
She begins:
For years, universities have embraced accreditation standards that echo their own ideological commitments, especially around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). These standards haven’t felt like external requirements so much as mutual reinforcement — accreditors writing expectations that colleges already agree with and colleges pointing back to those expectations whenever they want to justify a decision. Because of this, it is no surprise that universities are now pushing back against the Trump administration’s effort to end illegal university-accreditation demands for DEI.
Exactly. With accreditation “standards” demanding diversity in hiring and curriculum, school officials can tell critics, “But we don’t have any choice.”
Religious schools are especially under fire from accreditors if they don’t cave in to wokeness. Hendershott provides this example:
That’s exactly what happened at Saint Anselm College in 2020, when the founding order of the university, the Benedictine Monks, filed a lawsuit to prevent the college’s board of trustees from changing the bylaws without the consent of the monks. After more than a century of Benedictine governance, the board suddenly insisted that the university’s accrediting body, the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE) “required” them to dilute the monks’ authority. The monks knew what was really happening and filed the lawsuit to make it clear that the proposed bylaw changes would strip them of any meaningful role in safeguarding the college’s Catholic and Benedictine identity.
Hendershott is guardedly optimistic that the Trump administration might seriously disrupt the cozy relationship between leftist college leaders and their accreditors who abuse their authority by pushing DEI. I would add that to truly defang the accreditors, the government should stop making them the gatekeepers for federal student aid money.