EO on Accreditation Opens the Door for Rampant Corruption and Political Interference

President Donald Trump’s executive order on accreditation is yet another attempt to dictate what is taught, learned, said and done by college students and instructors. Threats to remove accreditors from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump administration in order to stifle teaching and research. These attacks are aimed at removing educational decision-making from educators and reshaping higher education to fit an authoritarian political agenda.  

Accreditation plays a key role in ensuring that students receive a high-quality college education. Today’s executive order, however, threatens to end this existing system, placing even greater power to shape higher education in the hands of partisan politicians.

Accreditation took its current form in response to widespread fraud by diploma mills after the 1944 GI Bill. With the 1958 National Defense Education Act, accreditation became the formal mechanism for recognizing which institutions should be eligible to receive federal higher education funding, a mechanism maintained in the Higher Education Act. More recently, accreditation has proven an essential tool for ensuring that academic institutions around the country pay careful attention to improving education outcomes.

Accrediting agencies have protected both students and the government from wasting money on scam institutions—like Trump University—that engage in deceit and grift. Trump’s executive order makes both students and the government more vulnerable to such fraud.

Accrediting agencies have also been important mechanisms for ensuring that academic institutions are accessible and inclusive, and provide high-quality education for all students. This executive order, however, uses the administration’s cruel and absurdist weaponization of antidiscrimination and civil rights law to prevent accrediting agencies from requiring that institutions take basic steps to ensure they are accessible to and inclusive of all students.

Furthermore, by threatening to decertify existing agencies and making it easier to create new agencies, the executive order forces accreditors to either transform themselves beyond recognition by taking on the political dictates and ideological claptrap of the administration, or be replaced by new fly-by-night agencies willing to toe the party line. This is exactly the kind of partisan interference that academic accreditation is supposed to guard against.

The Trump administration’s claim that the executive order will “advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning” is patently false. When politically motivated accreditors go to war with colleges, they typically try to shut campuses down, depriving students of opportunities to grow and flourish.
State control of accreditation would create a patchwork of rules and regulations that will add confusion and inefficiencies while also creating conditions where bad actors will become more emboldened to defraud students and their families.

AAUP President Todd Wolfson says, “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 espouse Trump’s ideological agenda. The order will upend protections for students and degrade their experience on campus.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten says, “Accreditation should be based on the quality of a college or university’s academic standards and support for students, not on whether a politician agrees with a school or professor’s ideology. That’s part of what made U.S. universities the envy of the world.

“President Trump’s new executive order appears to violate this. He appears to be saying that he alone can determine what our colleges can teach and what students can learn. This is a fundamental attack on free expression and free enterprise. It is a war on knowledge, and we will fight it.”