You don’t need a task force: Republican Gov. Jeff Landry should have simply ordered each university system in Louisiana to prepare for exiting the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges instead of studying the idea of transferring accreditation to the new, depoliticized incipient higher education accreditor the Commission on Public Higher Education, if CPHE is approved.
Last month, six southern states created the CPHE as an alternative to SACSCOC, concerned over the increasingly ideological meddling SACSCOC was enabling as part of the accreditation process. Federal law allows forming such agencies for self-policing of institutions to ensure they provide a legitimate education and have the means to do it, where an institution must be accredited to enjoy federal government largesse such as grants and the ability for students to receive federal government aid.
The effort started in Florida, kicked off when SACSCOC pressured a university system in Georgia and a university in Florida from accepting as candidates for leadership individuals who ideologically appeared at odds with the near-monolithic leftism infused throughout academia. It accelerated when states began to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes as foundational parts of admission, instruction, and employment regimes at institutions. And it came into fruition when Republican Pres. Donald Trump earlier this year issued an executive order to make it easier to transfer among accreditors and to start new ones.
If nothing else, SACSCOC rulers are clever in hiding their intentions, cloaking their opposition to the potential leaders in Florida and Georgia with misdirection. And, unlike all other major accreditors, while it doesn’t have an ironclad regulation forcing DEI concepts into the business of higher education, like in The Bridge over the River Kwai with Shears’ rebuke that when a man like Col. Nicholson makes a suggestion it’s really an order, SACSCOC has put out a position statement whose suggestion really is an order that an institution needs to have DEI as a standard.
That easily can be enforced as an agency selects faculty members from accredited institutions to review each institution’s rubric for accreditation. For example, agency representatives can guide a quality enhancement plan into including certain elements under the penalty of rejecting it if it lacks those. But they needn’t be so oblique: sometimes they bluntly have threatened an institution with refusing accreditation because, for example, it’s not racially diverse enough.
With the Trump order, which chided higher education as a whole for falling graduation rates and rising costs as well as DEI standards that run afoul of anti-discrimination federal law and states’ laws while urging reduced bureaucracy and greater emphasis on student outcomes and school accountability in accreditation, in place, many agencies have begun backtracking on overt DEI requirements. But and executive order only lasts as long as the president who issued it stays in office, and it could go away in just a few years.
So, it’s best to break with the hidebound accreditation agencies like SACSCOC in favor of the CPHE model that comports to the intentions in Trump’s order. Landry’s order issued this week appoints system board members, key legislators, and a few others to study making the move to CPHE in a couple of years (CPHE can start the process for accrediting, but it will not become legally binding until the federal Department of Education itself approves of CPHE), with conclusions due early next year.
Why wait? Move in that direction now. Even some leftist academicians who might have DEI sympathies but who have become increasingly perturbed at the needless bureaucratic grind that is part of the accreditation process and who want institutions to focus more on students will applaud this effort. Regardless of how Louisiana gets there, it’s the sooner, the better.
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