Accrediting the Accreditors in Higher Education

In an easily-overlooked, bureaucratic-sounding January 6, 2006, article, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the following:

"A committee that advises the U.S. Department of Education on accreditation has recommended that the government suspend recognition of the American Academy for Liberal Education for accrediting any new institutions or programs until it comes into compliance with federal requirements. . . . An Education Department report accused the academy of a 'lackadaisical approach to compliance' with the requirement, even after several requests by department officials."

What matters about this seemingly minor contretemps is that the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) is a conservative outfit, founded about 12 years ago, that specializes in accrediting conservative and religious colleges, such as Ave Maria College and Thomas Aquinas College, or university programs at such institutions as Baylor University. Currently, there are six major regional accrediting institutions, all of them secular and non-political, that play a crucial role in American higher education by reviewing whether the education that a college provides meets certain basic intellectual and pedagogical standards. Accreditation is necessary not only for good education and for the public reputation of a school, but in order for that school to receive any money from the federal government.

What we would like to take for granted, of course, is that the accreditors themselves are responsible organizations whose judgments are impartial, professional, and politically neutral. This, unfortunately, does not characterize the AALE, whose ideological slant is given away by the fact that it has received substantial funding from the arch-conservative Olin Foundation, which has been a major contributor to right-wing causes, scholars, and institutions ranging from Robert Bork and Allan Bloom to the Heritage Foundation and Phyllis Schalfly's Eagle Foundation.

The scrape over AALE, therefore, points toward the bigger picture regarding the politics of education in the United States, and it suggests that the conservative movement is seeking a new avenue of influence.

The Right has been up in arms for decades over what they see as the domination of American universities by what they see as the leftist intelligentsia. In particular, conservatives oppose the two major trends in higher education of the last 30 years: ethnic and curricular diversity, and (to a lesser extent) scientific secularism. They tend to paint the relative liberalism of American colleges and universities (most professors do not identify themselves as conservatives) as some kind of political conspiracy, rather than as a reflection of conservatives' own shortcomings. Conservative applicants to faculty positions at serious universities often fail to find employment not because of political bias against them, but because their work does not sufficiently embody the values of free inquiry, tolerance, and objectivity that we associate with higher learning in our post-medieval world. Just look at the debate over intelligent design, a losing cause if ever there was one. The world has changed, knowledge advances, intellectual paradigms have shifted, and scholars who refuse to keep up will be sailing against a strong headwind.

Instead, the frustrated conservative movement has pursued an array of strategies designed to regain some influence within the academy: organizing speakers' events, offering scholarships to conservative students, providing funding with strings attached, grooming conservative students for admission to professional post-graduate programs, and so on. Pressure tactics have also made an appearance. Just this month, a conservative-dominated committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature, in a kind of fishing expedition, interrogated Temple University president David Adamany about alleged liberal bias at the school, despite the fact that no students have filed a complaint. Meanwhile, David Horowitz, a conservative activist based in California, has authored something called the "academic bill of rights," a measure he believes will make higher education more tolerant of conservatives, which is currently pending in several state legislatures.

So the AALE kerfuffle suggests what the accrediting tactic is really all about: giving the stamp of approval to schools that teach conservative ideas, whether or not those schools would pass muster otherwise. As with the rise of the home-school movement and Christian academies as alternatives to public education, the conservative accrediting strategy is a roundabout, even devious, way of opting out of the educational mainstream. It is also analogous to conservative efforts to amend the Constitution on such issues as flag-burning and gay marriage. Such amendments would represent an end-run around both legislatures and courts, since they would by definition establish the law of the land, virtually beyond retraction. Similarly, if the movement can get conservative and religious schools accredited, they'll not have to worry about whether the quality of research or teaching meets nationally accepted standards.

There is a bitter irony here. The conservatives' attack on liberal education in general, and the accrediting strategy in particular is presented as a defense of standards against the encroachments of multiculturalism and "political correctness," and against an erosion of respect for the Western tradition. But it is really a devious way of avoiding the standards that conservatives don't like, standards which intelligent design, for example, does not even come close to meeting. Indeed, that gets to exactly the reason why the Department of Education committee recommended suspending recognition of AALE -- because it wasn't requiring schools to demonstrate that they had sufficiently assessed what students had learned.

This political approach to education is part of a broader social trend, and it reflects an interesting split in how the two sides of the political spectrum have spent their intellectual energy over recent decades. During the 1960s and ‘70s, liberals began moving into academia in larger numbers, while conservative intellectualism found its primary home in think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. Ever since, we've had to listen to a lot of celebrating on the right about conservatives winning "the war of ideas." The problem with this view, however, is that while conservatives have had much success promoting their ideas among politicians and "on the street," so to speak, they have not won the war of ideas as it is practiced at the highest levels. In large measure, that's because, while the conservative think tanks are devoted primarily to ideological battles, the university is still committed to standards such as peer review, testability, accountability, and the free exchange of ideas. Those standards, and the values that lie behind them, do not thrive at places like Bob Jones University or Patrick Henry College.

It's nice to know, therefore, that someone is accrediting the accreditors. Let's keep it that way.

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