I have long thought that accreditation is just about useless as a guarantee of quality and integrity in higher education, and the article the Pope Center has just released gives additional support to my skeptical view. In it, Prof. Tony Fels of the University of San Francisco writes about the indifference with which the Western Association of Schools and Colleges treated his complaint that a dean had set his department up for a bad review of its “diversity” efforts by stacking the review team with people known to be diversity zealots. That would appear to violate WASC standards, but WASC couldn’t be bothered even to investigate Professor Fels’s charges.

Is accreditation more about political correctness than anything else?