Trump’s Attack on Accreditation Continues Dangerous Assault on American Higher Ed

AAUP President Todd Wolfson released the following statement on June 6, 2025:

The Trump administration’s attempt to strip Columbia University of its accreditation is yet another authoritarian attempt to control what can be said, thought, taught, and learned on college campuses. Once again, the Trump Education Department is trampling academic freedom and forcing students, faculty, and staff at Columbia to answer to one and only one person: Donald J. Trump.

This week’s aggression against workers and students at Columbia adds accreditation to the arsenal of weapons being used by the Trump administration to bully colleges and universities. Accreditation exists to ensure that students receive high-quality education from trustworthy institutions. Commandeering the accreditation system and twisting it for partisan purposes is a betrayal of students who are pursuing opportunity and agency through a college education. These students are the real victims of Trump’s attack, because they will lose their financial aid if Columbia loses its accreditation. This is key to Trump’s real agenda: preventing all except the wealthiest elite from going to college.

Hollowing out accreditation opens the door to fraud and grift in colleges and universities. That corruption is already evident in the Trump administration’s weaponization of antisemitism as a pretext for their threat to Columbia’s accreditation. There is no evidence at Columbia for the alleged Title VI violations. When it comes to Title VI enforcement, the Trump administration is trying to arbitrarily define the rules, manufacture the evidence, declare guilt, and distribute punishment. 

Under this pretense, accreditation is a partisan weapon wielded by ideologues, MAGA extremists, and authoritarians seeking to bend American institutions to do their bidding. The stakes for higher education and democratic governance couldn’t be clearer. The Trump administration’s target is not just Columbia, but all of higher education. The people who will suffer from these attacks are the would-be doctors, teachers, and engineers whose futures will be stolen along with their education. Students dreaming of attending Columbia will have those dreams shattered when they find that financial aid is not available to attend a nonaccredited institution.

Despite Columbia's capitulation to the Trump administration’s ideological agenda, the school remains a target for the administration's political attacks. College and university administrators should take note: No amount of anticipatory obedience will ever be enough to satisfy the fascist appetite for control over educational institutions that uphold the foundational principles of democracy and the free exchange of ideas.

Trump’s goal is to manipulate accreditors in order to force colleges and universities to do his bidding and punish them when they resist. He is weaponizing the accreditation process to gain the leverage he seeks. This order is yet another example of the Trump administration’s attempts to control American higher education. The stated goal of increasing “intellectual diversity” is code for a partisan agenda that will muzzle faculty who do not fall in line with Trump’s ideological agenda. The order will upend protections for students and degrade their experience on campus.