Many in the higher-ed world fear for its future. Two recent columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education are typical.
In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise here is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational and that conservative would-be reformers—not, say, Shireman and his colleagues at the progressive Century Foundation—are the extremist radicals.
Anti-reformers’ implicit premise is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational.In the second, Gardner-Webb University associate provost Greg Pillar and accreditation consultant Laurie Shanderson imagine the consequences of President Trump’s campaign promise to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs.” They fear that new accrediting agencies created by Republican-controlled states and recognized by the Trump administration would not garner the respect of “employers and graduate programs,” thus “disadvantaging students in affected states.” In such a “politicized,” “bifurcated accreditation system, … institutions aligned with traditional accreditors [would] maintain credibility while those accredited by new, politically driven agencies [would] face skepticism.”
