In a 2023 campaign video, Donald Trump called accreditation reform the “secret weapon” in his war against higher education. Since his re-election the following year, America’s colleges and universities have waited anxiously to learn whether and how this weapon would be used.
This spring, they found out.
In May, the federal Department of Education released new draft regulations for the nation’s accreditation agencies that would deal a staggering blow to accreditors’ ability to act in the interest of academic freedom. The proposed rules would codify a dangerously narrow definition of academic freedom and tie accreditors’ hands if a university or college claims its actions are covered under an incredibly broad “intellectual diversity” exception or under state law. The draft will be updated and opened for public comment in the coming weeks, but the anticipated revisions are unlikely to address the current proposal’s pitfalls.
Accreditors Matter
First, why do higher education accreditors matter? As guarantors of academic excellence and institutional stability, they are one of the unsung champions of academic freedom in America. To earn and keep accreditation, a university must meet certain standards around tenure and collegial governance, protect the expressive freedoms of students and faculty, and guard against undue political interference. If accreditation is lost, a university’s students are no longer eligible for federal work-study funds, Pell Grants, and other forms of federal financial aid. Since financial aid is essential for most students, accreditation bodies wield considerable power.
And on the whole, they have used that power to defend academic freedom and shared governance. Some examples include:
- In late 2021, the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees blocked three of its professors from testifying against a new state law. On November 1 of that year, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) launched an investigation to determine whether UF was still in compliance with the accreditor’s academic freedom standards. Four days later, the university announced that it would reverse course and allow the professors to testify.
- In February 2023, North Idaho College had its accreditation downgraded by its accreditor, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NCCU). This followed an investigation by NCCU that had found rampant violations at North Idaho College of the accreditor’s Governance and Academic Freedom standards, including that the Board chair’s “political statements and role in questioning curricular content has had a chilling effect on faculty independence and diverse thought.” In 2025, after numerous reforms and multiple site visits by NCCU, North Idaho College’s accreditation was upgraded, though it remained under scrutiny for at least another year.
- In 2024, after student protesters at Yale Law School and Stanford Law School tried to shut down events organized by the conservative Federalist Society, the American Bar Association adopted new standards on free speech and academic freedom. The new standards, which US law schools must uphold to maintain ABA accreditation, protect students’ right to protest, but also require law schools to prohibit “disruptive conduct that hinders free expression.”
There are many more examples. While higher education accreditors are an imperfect tool (they do not always intervene to protect academic freedom – and when they do, they don’t always follow through with consequences), universities are better for their efforts. This is especially true for private institutions, which are not bound by the First Amendment and where accreditors are sometimes one of the only checks against administrative censorship.
Accreditation “Reform” & Academic Freedom
All of this makes accreditors an obstacle to those who wish to dismantle academic freedom and subjugate universities to political whims. And that’s what makes recent actions of the federal government so alarming.
In May, as part of the ongoing negotiated rule-making process, the Department of Education released new draft regulations for the nation’s accreditation agencies. These are the basic rules that accreditors must follow when evaluating a college or university, and historically they have been narrowly drawn so as to accommodate a range of accreditation philosophies.
If the Department of Education adopts these regulations (and it seems unlikely that any future revisions will address our concerns), everything is about to change. In fact, the new regulations seem purposely built to weaken accreditors and end their role as custodians of academic freedom.
Academic freedom is the bedrock of the success of U.S. higher education, providing a foundation for innovation and ensuring students have access to a curriculum free of government censorship. The standard definition of academic freedom in the U.S. is laid out by the AAUP, and it explicitly encompasses four components of faculty speech or writing: teaching, research, institutional policy or governance, and extramural speech or writing. For faculty to successfully fulfill their obligations to their students, their institutions and their communities, they need to be able to engage in each of these spheres without fear of retribution.
Which is why the narrow definition of academic freedom offered in the proposed regulations is so menacing. The final version may look different (already the criticism has been fierce), but the current draft creates significant and dangerous exceptions to academic freedom that would undermine protections for both extramural speech, on the one hand, and classroom speech and research, on the other. They would also leave entirely unprotected faculty members’ speech on issues of university policy or governance. As a result, while the regulations purport to protect academic freedom, the carve-outs and exceptions included in the draft offer scholars little protection at all.
First, despite asserting that faculty members enjoy the same rights to speak out in their personal capacity as any other private citizen in the U.S., the draft regulations allow and even invite universities to limit those rights. Faculty speech must be “lawful and comply with applicable institutional rules and policies” – a provision that might sound reasonable, but that actually gives great leeway to universities to curb academic freedom. What happens when faculty speech breaks one of those rules or policies (which at some universities are grossly censorial)? This is left unsaid, but recent examples of faculty punished and even terminated for private speech abound. When you put asterisks on a citizen’s right to speak, there is no freedom of speech at all.
Second, the draft regulations also situate a university’s interest in promoting “intellectual diversity” as another potential restraint on academic freedom:
Nothing in this definition shall be construed to prohibit institutions or accrediting agencies from adopting and enforcing policies reasonably designed to promote intellectual diversity, the exposure of students to a range of scholarly viewpoints, or the balanced presentation of competing perspectives, so long as such policies do not infringe the core protections of academic freedom described in this section.
We explored in detail how “intellectual diversity” or “viewpoint diversity,” which are laudable goals for any campus, can function as a trojan horse for censorship in our recent report, America’s Censored Campuses 2025: Expanding the Web of Control. As we reported there, all kinds of policies anathema to academic freedom have been justified in the name of “viewpoint diversity,” including political interference in hiring and firing, manipulation of the curriculum, and outright censorship. This provision opens the door for more such abuses.
Third, the draft regulations offer absolutely no protection for faculty who speak out on issues of institutional policy. To be clear – participating in the governance of a college or university is a central component of a faculty member’s job. Whether by serving on departmental or university-wide committees, on a faculty senate or a statewide or disciplinary body, faculty are expected to devote significant time to administrative and curricular matters, as part of the principle of shared governance. And doing so is a component of their ongoing evaluations. Since this is where many of the most vicious attacks on academic freedom are concentrated right now, this omission is alarming.
What are the consequences of all of this? Consider a faculty member who is put on leave because a politician objects to a social media post they shared about a political event. Or a professor who is told that their course on Critical Race Theory will be canceled unless reworked to include significant attention to color-blind racial ideology. Or a faculty senator who loses their job because they spoke out in a meeting against a campus initiative backed by the university president.
None of these faculty members would be protected under the academic freedom language in the draft regulations.
At this point, it is hard to see why the draft regulations bother to have any mention of academic freedom at all. They include so many carve-outs, exceptions, loopholes, and restrictions that they provide little protection for faculty doing their jobs. What they do is roll out the welcome carpet for censors.
Hamstringing Accreditors
Even more alarming is the implicit threat found toward the end of the “Application of standards” section, where the draft regulations lay out what sorts of standards accrediting agencies must use when evaluating a university. It reads:
The [accrediting] agency may not have standards that encourage, direct, or otherwise require institutions or programs to violate Federal or State law, including by having policies that provide any preferences on the basis of race.”
On its face, this rule would prohibit accrediting agencies from doing anything to challenge the dozens of anti-free speech laws now on the books in states across the country. That includes Florida, where there’s a law against “teach[ing] identity politics” in general education courses. And Mississippi, where recently passed (and currently enjoined) HB 1193 would make it illegal to promote “transgender ideology” and the “deconstruction of heteronormativity” in an academic program or course. The proposed rule could also further incentivize Texas’s continued tactic of erroneously claiming that federal or state laws require policies and curricular decisions that curtail or prohibit discussions of “DEI” or gender or sexuality in the classroom – even though no such laws exist. This tactic has already effectively cowed one accrediting body into silence. There is no reason to suppose it won’t spread elsewhere.
In fact, it is not impossible to imagine a national race to the bottom. The standards used by an accrediting agency don’t normally differ state to state. The whole point is to have one set of criteria that apply equally to all. That way, prospective students know what exactly they’re getting and can shop around for the best education at the most affordable price.
But if the price of entry for an accrediting agency in a state like Texas is to adopt Texas-style standards around academic freedom and political independence (which is to say very low standards indeed), those same standards will have to be applied to every other university it accredits as well, regardless of where they are located. It is not so different from the nationwide influence that Texas once exerted over K-12 school textbooks. So if SACSCOC, the current accreditor for universities across much of the South, wishes to keep its Texas clients, it will effectively have to impose Texas’ standards on universities in Georgia, North Carolina, and anywhere else its services extend.
Finally, another provision would prohibit accrediting agencies from “review[ing]…aspects of institutional governance of public institutions that are established by State law, including the appointment of institutional directors or officers by elected or appointed state officials.”
Here too, the implications are straightforward and devastating. If adopted, the ability of accrediting agencies to oppose some of the most blatant forms of political interference in higher education would be compromised. That includes events like the one that unfolded at Florida State University in 2021, when the state university system Board of Governors tried to install Richard Corcoran, one of its own members and a controversial DeSantis ally, as FSU president. FSU’s accreditor cried foul and the appointment was revoked, but thereafter DeSantis vowed revenge on the entire accreditation system and took aim at SACSCOC in particular. Since then, under DeSantis’ leadership, Florida has seen political figures installed as presidents of 5 of the 12 public universities in the state. The new federal regulations would prevent accreditors from providing much needed protection against such cronyism.
The War in the States
Unfortunately, the federal government is only part of the story. Multiple states have launched their own versions of accreditation reform, and those initiatives are just as dangerous to free inquiry as anything coming out of Washington, D.C.
In 2022, Adam Kissel, of the Heritage Foundation, called for state legislatures to “assert [their] prerogative over the content of curriculum at various levels.” He later suggested that one way of doing that would be for states to seize control of the accreditation process. In October 2025, Kissel was appointed to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), a body tasked with making recommendations to the Department of Education on accreditation reform. Meanwhile, state legislatures have taken up Kissel’s charge to rewrite the rules on accreditation in earnest.
As noted above, the state-level attack on accreditation began as early as 2022, when Florida made good on DeSantis’s promise of revenge and enacted a bill requiring public universities to periodically change accreditors, a move designed to sideline SACSCOC. North Carolina followed suit in 2023, passing its own bill to require institutions to change accreditors. Simultaneously, Florida sued the federal government, arguing that the entire gatekeeping role played by private accreditors was unconstitutional (a federal judge dismissed this lawsuit in 2024, but Florida appealed and it is now before the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals).
In the meantime, Florida has worked to further unsettle the system of independent accreditors by establishing an alternative accrediting agency, the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE). Announced as a collaboration among six Southern state university systems, it is spearheaded by Florida and, in fact, is funded by a direct agreement with the Board of Governors of the Florida State University System. Whether or how CPHE will be able to impartially evaluate the very university system that pays its expenses remains to be seen. But such practical considerations have done little to dampen political support for CPHE, which according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will help to break “the activist controlled accreditation monopoly” and prioritize “student achievement without ideological capture.” In reality, it is more likely to invite to rampant state interference in the accreditation process.
While all this has been unfolding, multiple legislative efforts to weaken higher education accreditors have been launched by states across the south and midwest. Since 2021, at least nine bills have been proposed in six states that would regulate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in accreditation, including an Arkansas law enacted last year prohibiting public colleges and universities from complying with standards “related to DEI.” Two of these proposals would have gone even further. Oklahoma and West Virginia each considered bills this year that would have required public universities in their respective states to determine if their current accreditor has “adopted or used in the past five (5) years any diversity, equity, and inclusion practice or procedure in connection with accreditation,” and, if so, to immediately switch to an accreditor that has not. Both measures failed to pass, but it is fair to wonder if this sort of provision is not designed to benefit new accreditors, like CPHE, that didn’t even exist five years ago.
A different West Virginia bill would have gone about the matter in reverse. Instead of regulating universities, it would have regulated the accreditors themselves, essentially requiring them to drop their DEI standards as a condition of taking on any public university in the state as a client. Bills introduced in South Carolina, HB 3476 from 2025, and Michigan HB 5242, a 2026 bill still pending, go further – requiring both public and private colleges and universities to drop DEI standards. While only Arkansas has passed a law explicitly targeting “DEI,” Florida, Iowa, Kansas, and Tennessee essentially do that already through a combination of measures. Each of the four states now either prohibit an accrediting agency from requiring an institution to violate state law or allow an institution to sue an accreditor for taking “adverse” against it for complying with state law. Each also has measures on the books that, in one way or another, restrict education or programming that could be tied to “DEI.” Check and mate.
Finally, discipline-specific accreditors are also now in the cross-hairs. Over the last year, momentum has grown to strip the American Bar Association of its role in accrediting the nation’s law schools. Already, the state Supreme Courts of Texas, Alabama, and Florida have formally ended the ABA’s exclusive role in deciding whether a law school’s graduates are eligible to sit for their state’s bar exam. Critics justify this move by painting the ABA as a partisan liberal organization. Whether there is substance to those complaints or not, what is clear is that the uncertainty created by the Texas, Alabama, and Florida decisions has created an opening for new, untested, and potentially unscrupulous law school accreditors. And the trend may be spreading. The Tennessee and Ohio state supreme courts are reportedly considering taking the same plunge.
And the states are gunning for medical program accreditors, too. In April, responding to what it referred to as “pressure” from the federal government, a body that accredits the nation’s osteopathy programs voted to abandon its DEI standards. Meanwhile, a new report from Do No Harm, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to “protecting healthcare from the disastrous consequences of identity politics,” argues that medical education will never be “fully rid…of DEI” until the “role of accreditors [is] examined and addressed.” It is too soon to say what will come of these efforts, but Do No Harm’s message will likely find a friendly audience with the federal government, as its lead researcher is the chair of the body charged with overseeing accreditor approval and compliance.
Who Can Hold the Line?
For decades, independent accreditors have been relied on to provide clarity and stability for higher education institutions – not always perfectly, but in a way that ultimately has strengthened the nation’s educational institutions. All of that is now up in the air as the rules for accreditation are being rewritten on the fly by state legislators and the federal government. When states require universities to change accreditors, and when politicians raise the threat of lawsuits against accreditors who seek to maintain standards around DEI, the accreditors lose their teeth. They become unable to protect academic freedom and shield universities from political interference. Everything – educational quality, research, student well-being – takes a back seat to political exigency.
What’s playing out this year in Texas – as legislators and political appointees impose draconian censorship policies on classroom instruction and even graduate student research – gives us a preview of what lies ahead for higher education nationwide: fewer options for students and unacceptable limitations on curriculum and campus programming. The independent accreditors that were supposed to hold the line, to protect the integrity of educational programs and uphold the values of academic freedom, equity, and inclusion on our campuses have been relegated to the sidelines. This leaves faculty, students and the whole higher education sector vulnerable to a sack.
That’s the new playbook. And that’s why protecting accreditors matters so much to the future of higher education right now.
