The Wall Street Journal featured a revealing article by law professor Gail Heriot. She discusses the travails of George Mason’s excellent law school with regard to accreditation by the American Bar Association. GMU has been thrashed for not meeting adequate minority quotas.

More evidence that accreditation doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about academic quality. Instead, it is used to push ideological agendas.

This would not be a problem at all if GMU (and other law schools) could just tell the ABA, “We don’t care what you think of us,” but so long as student eligibility for federal student aid is at stake, it can hardly do so. (Unless, of course, it finds a way to help needed students finance their education without any federal funds, as Hillsdale has done.)

We ought to cut the Gordian Knot and deregulate the legal profession, as I argued here.