Free Republic

On Wednesday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” 2024 presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stated that he’ll reform the college accreditation system so “instead of you have to have gender studies, or you have to have DEI to get accredited, it’ll be the opposite. We’re not going to accredit you if you have DEI and some of these other things.” Host Hugh Hewitt asked, “As president, what can you do about tenure from K-12 and in colleges that are state-funded?” DeSantis responded, “Through the accreditation cartel. So, we’re going to totally blow up the accreditation cartel. Right now, part of the...

College accreditation used to be the most soporific of topics. Almost nobody was interested in it because accreditation meant so little. Accrediting agencies had their standards that kept degree mills from fooling people into thinking they were real colleges. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t a matter of national concern. In recent years, however, accreditation has become highly controversial. The reason is that the accrediting agencies have ceased to be neutral parties who apply reasonable standards to ensure that students are not squandering their federal student-aid funds on dodgy schools that are just interested in cashing in on easy...

When you buy a car, a piece of furniture, or a pleasure boat, you typically don’t ask the seller, “Is the manufacturer accredited?” We buy all kinds of things, even houses, despite no third party assessing the quality or integrity of the good or service being sold. Why do we behave differently with higher education? Informal higher-ed assessments abound. U.S. News, Forbes, Washington Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and others assess the quality and reputation of colleges, and those judgments are eagerly read by the public. (I know, as one who formerly directed one of those rankings.) The federal government...

A Christian school has taken its case to the highest human rights court in Europe after German officials refused to grant accreditation because of its innovative hybrid approach, which merges in-person and at-home learning, even though the school fulfills all state-required standards and curricula. The Association for Decentralized Learning filed the case at the European Court of Human Rights last week, according to the rights group ADF International, which is supporting the school provider and maintains that the German state’s restrictive educational system is infringing upon parental rights and educational freedom. “The right to education includes the right to embrace...

Federal financial aid depends on whether your college is accredited. That means an independent agency vouches for your college, assuring that it’s not a scam and that it fulfills its promises. Accreditors have a huge amount of power. Too often, they abuse it. Fortunately, there are solutions. One way that accreditors abuse power is to interfere with university governance. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) is the most notorious. SACS recently intervened in the decisions of at least three universities in Florida. The accreditor infamously threatened the august University of Virginia when it didn’t like how UVA’s board...

Legal education is about to undergo a revolutionary change, with the American Bar Association poised to mandate race-focused study as a prerequisite to graduating from law school. ... This race-focused educational mandate is being forced on law schools through the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (ABA). Much of ABA’s power stems from the federal government. Law students must attend schools whose accreditor is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education to receive federal student loans. The ABA is the only federally recognized law school accreditor. Yet, ABA’s accreditation power doesn’t...

The Dalton School hosts an annual conference for New York City private schools on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This May, it was Rodney Glasgow’s turn to deliver the keynote address. Glasgow, a longtime school administrator who has founded multiple DEI consultancies, used his speech to address the elephant in the room: the parental pushback to "antiracism" at Dalton and other elite private schools, which made national headlines after Dalton headmaster Jim Best resigned amid the uproar. The disgruntled parents, Glasgow said, were like the "white supremacists" who stormed the Capitol. And the schools that had admitted their children were like...

Leaked emails prove that, contrary to United Nations denials, UN human-rights officials did in fact give the names of Chinese dissidents to the communist regime in Beijing before those activists were set to testify in Geneva against the Communist Chinese Party’s abuses. In fact, it appears from the leaked documents that the practice of handing over names of Chinese dissidents to the dictatorship was viewed as a “usual practice” by all involved. The whistleblower told The Epoch Times that it continues to this day, despite UN denials. Chinese communist authorities used the names received from the UN to prevent the...

Because Democrats don't hesitate to use power even if they lack legitimacy, they will go farther than Obama did in pushing transgender ideology on American children over the next four years.The next several years are likely to reopen the floodgates to leftists’ long repurposing of public schools to indoctrinate children with lies about sex. According to leftist reporting, once in office Joe Biden plans to quickly use executive power to push transgenderism in schools, farther than President Obama did. In Congress, Democrats plan to prioritize legislation to do the same, potentially with Republican support, with the so-called Equality Act and...

The good news is that the Left has noticed what a scam college accreditation is. The bad news: They want the federal government to take it over. "Accreditors are self-regulating membership organizations," Ben Miller, David Bergeron and Carmel Martin write in a report released this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP). "This means that agencies' revenue comes almost entirely from dues and fees paid by the institutions they oversee." "This includes annual sustaining fees, as well as payments for specific functions such as an initial review to judge if an institution meets standards for approval or special visits...

Two of America’s three branches of federal government have declared war on parental authority. President Obama’s Department of Education has been explicitly attacking schools that have the audacity to prefer traditional morality. However, making sense of the Education Department’s actions requires looking at the Obergefell same-sex “marriage” decision. The Obergefell decision explains why the Department of Education will not stop until it has eliminated parental authority to teach traditional morality to their children.The Department of Education has recently targeted an Illinois public school. The school allowed a (biologically male) transgendered student to participate in girls’ sports. The student was...

A court in Canada has ruled that a Christian law school can be denied accreditation for having a policy in opposition to homosexuality. In a ruling made last week, a three-judge Divisional Court of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled against Trinity Western University, which had filed a lawsuit against the Law Society of Upper Canada after it denied accreditation to the evangelical Christian university based in Vancouver, British Colombia, in April 2014.

Apparently the only jobs college accreditation reviewers are interested in are their own, not those of recent college graduates. “Accreditation has become a roadblock to reform,” Hank Brown, the former president of the University of Colorado, said at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, “a system that leads to majors that go nowhere.” I asked him whether college accreditation boards even considered the post-graduation employment of graduates as an afterthought in their reviews. “I’ve seen very few accreditation ratings that focus on that,” he said. “I think that would be of great value.” Brown is also the former president of the University...

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor recently argued that Wheaton College’s accreditation, as well as that of several other religious colleges, should be revoked on the grounds that the schools’ required statements of faith violate academic freedom. I write not merely to defend Wheaton’s right to exist, but to express my gratitude that it does exist. Wheaton is an Evangelical Christian college in Illinois that houses the C. S. Lewis papers. I went there recently for a dialogue on C. S. Lewis and reading carefully, even reverently. While I am neither specifically Evangelical, like Wheaton, nor a...

An academic sets out to expose “The Great Accreditation Farce” but his efforts border on the farcical. “By awarding accreditation to religious colleges, the process confers legitimacy on institutions that systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education,” Peter Conn wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Skeptical and unfettered inquiry is the hallmark of American teaching and research.” “However, such inquiry cannot flourish—in many cases, cannot even survive—inside institutions that erect religious tests for truth.” Conn is an English professor at Penn. “This, in my view, can only be described as a scandal,” Conn avers. “Providing accreditation to...

Lawyers from the Law Society of British Columbia voted to prevent the British Columbia Trinity Western University from conferring law degrees due to the school's Community Covenant Agreement which requires that students "voluntarily abstain" from "sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman." According to the National Post, despite early results which suggested an overwhelmingly victory of 3210 to 968, the decision is not binding and only expresses the sentiments of those in the Law Society. Thirty-one benchers are still responsible for offering the final verdict on the law school, which is set to...

Dickinson State University got caught issuing hundreds of phony degrees to foreign students, something for which nobody outside of former President Richard McCallum has been held accountable. McCallum, who I guess we’re supposed to believe pulled of this fraud by himself, was merely fired. Horwarth’s article quoted a newspaper editor in West Virginia who covered the HLC’s decision to remove accreditation from Mountain State University. “If I’m Dickinson State, I would be nervous,” he told Horwarth. That article prompted angry denunciations from DSU officials and North Dakota University System Chancellor Larry Skogen who called the idea of lost accreditation “impossible.”...

Rick Perry is waging an undeclared war on higher education—in particular, on the state’s two flagship institutions, the University of Texas and his own alma mater, Texas A&M. He has delegated higher education policy to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think tank, which has produced an ideological blueprint for how the state’s universities should be governed. The objectives are accountability, transparency, and productivity. Several of the TPPF’s recommendations have already been put into practice at Texas A&M. UT has resisted so far, but the administrators I spoke with believe the battle is likely to be a losing...

In his five-page response to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools dated April 28, Superintendent Fred Sanderson states he has “genuine concerns” about the Cobb Board of Education’s ability to “govern effectively.” Sanderson’s letter, which was obtained by the Journal through an Open Records Request, addressed allegations about the school board’s ethics and leadership. The allegations against the board were sent in a letter addressed to Sanderson by Mike Bryans, the state director of AdvancED and SACS, on March 29. Sanderson had 30 days to respond to the accreditation agency. On the lightning-rod issue of newly elected board members...

LIMA, Peru (BP)--Doors are opening for Baptist seminaries in Peru in light of new legislation making governmental accreditation available to non-Catholic seminaries. The new law "presents an opportunity for the Baptist seminaries, but also a challenge," said International Mission Board missionary Phil Calvert, who works with Baptist seminaries and other initiatives to help advance theological education among national partners in Ecuador and Peru. "Now seminary students who want to have an accredited degree have an evangelical choice," Calvert said. Calvert invited some Southern Baptist seminary representatives to Lima to lead a January pastors' conference. Leaders from New Orleans Baptist Theological...