The accrediting commissions that have been empowered to decide whether colleges are good enough to receive federal student aid funds were supposed to ensure that schools had high standards and that their students made academic progress. In reality, the accreditors often seem to rubber-stamp schools as long as those schools adhere to leftist notions about diversity. Many students graduate with little or no intellectual gains.
Now, there is a new accreditor — the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE) — and the education blob is not happy. In today’s Martin Center article, Keller Moore looks at the complaints and finds them to be groundless.
Moore writes:
The CPHE promises better. Its three core principles address the incumbent accreditors’ shortfalls:
• A return to true peer-review—for publics, by publics: Public Universities share similarities in governance, financial models, and mission that make them peers of one another to a much greater degree than an institution from another sector that happens to be geographically close.
• A focus on student outcomes, not inputs: With a focus on transparent, publicly available data, CPHE will be a partner, not a hindrance, to governing boards and other policymakers who seek to emphasize student outcomes.
• A reduction of unnecessary bureaucracy, opacity, and expense: CPHE will meet the requirements to achieve recognition as an institutional accreditor by the U.S. Department of Education. In doing so, it will leverage the fact that its membership is exclusively public to build more efficient standards and procedures.
What’s the gripe? Simply that CPHE is a conservative idea. The leftist-controlled higher ed system doesn’t want anything that reduces its level of control. Moore hits the nail on the head when he writes: “We all know that American academia is hugely liberal and that other viewpoints are regularly silenced or ‘canceled.’ The late Charlie Kirk’s campus Q&A sessions made this fact clear. When the AAUP and UFF complain about preserving academic freedom or ‘politicizing accreditation,’ they aren’t interested in a real toleration of different ideas. They worry that the CPHE could loosen their chokehold on the worldviews taught in colleges. It is the CPHE, not the faculty associations, that will bring real intellectual diversity to campuses.”
That’s why the left is unhappy.