The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulates fuel-economy standards for new cars sold in the U.S. But imagine if the agency began badgering manufacturers about color. Red? Too beloved of white, heterosexual males. Gold? Not today, your majesty. The idea is ridiculous, un-American, an affront to the prerogatives of a free people. It is also analogous to what university accreditors regularly attempt to do in higher education.

Higher-ed accreditation is a failed experiment. Though accreditors were, at one time, mere humble bureaucrats protecting the public purse, they have transmogrified into swollen ticks on the nation’s colleges, infecting institutional bloodstreams with ideological pathogens. That few Americans have heard of accreditation or can name an accrediting body is a significant advantage for those who would maintain the current system. The job of reformers, therefore, has been to name and shame accreditor overreach, resist it when possible, and educate Republican officials about the extent to which accreditors have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the Left. While the battle is far from over, there is some evidence that the strategy is working.

University accreditation began as a voluntary practice in the late 19th century. Then, as now, established colleges wished to distinguish themselves from fraudulent upstarts, and many pooled their resources to form regional quality-control organizations. Had the federal government never involved itself in higher-ed financing, accreditation might have continued indefinitely as a discretional guild system, alerting consumers to agreed-upon standards and reproaching institutions that failed to meet them. Instead, upon the reauthorization of the GI Bill in 1952, Congress deputized accreditors to gatekeep federal financial aid. If a college wanted GI Bill dollars, it had to gain the approval of a recognized accrediting body.

To say that this system has calcified in the decades since is to understate the extent to which accreditors now rule the higher-ed roost. An unaccredited university is not eligible to accept students’ Pell Grants, federal work-study funds, or federally backed student loans. (Nearly all student loans have been federally backed since the mid 1960s.) Alumni of unaccredited colleges can find their path to graduate or professional programs blocked. For much of the 20th century’s second half, accreditors wore their power lightly, asking mainly that universities refrain from obvious degree-mill practices such as hiring unqualified faculty or offering a comically abridged course of study. In recent years, however, the accrediting bodies have joined the great game of politics. Any failure to comply with their increasingly left-leaning demands can spell doom for colleges whose very lifeblood is the government-loan dollar.

To browse the accreditors’ websites is to find abundant evidence of this evolution. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, for example, requires colleges to apply diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles not only to academic curricula but to institutional “goals and actions,” “demographics and policies,” and “resource allocation.” The New England Commission of Higher Education demands “diverse” boards of trustees and faculty rosters, while the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities mandates “a focus on equity and [the] closure of achievement gaps” on campus. It bears emphasizing that these are not friendly suggestions: The more than 900 postsecondary institutions overseen by these three agencies alone must toe the DEI line or risk losing their status as accredited. Nor are racial politics the only swamp into which accreditors have lately waded. Until last month, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission required its more than 200 institutions to disaggregate student-achievement data by gender, age, economic status, and disability. (A new handbook released in July requires only “disaggregated student outcomes data,” though what that means will be clear enough to administrators.) The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) is so committed to leftist governance that it has begun threatening university officials who so much as tiptoe in conservative directions.

Before I offer a few examples of such threats, I should explain a dynamic that regularly thwarts the reform efforts of right-leaning alumni, college presidents, state legislatures, and governors. Because the vast majority of faculty and administrators are themselves politically progressive, the ideological dictates of the accrediting bodies are not only welcome on campus but positively beloved. Suggest, say, that an institution’s focus should be on intellectual rather than demographic diversity, and college employees will howl that the accrediting body won’t allow it. Thus do vogue ideological fixations take on the guise of inevitability. With one hand, the Left fills the teaching and administrative ranks with reliable progressives. With the other, it limits pushback by linking funding to compliance with progressive directives. Just as public-sector unions enrich, and are enriched by, elected Democrats, so the Left both creates and enforces the campus norms on which next year’s budget depends. And on the wheel turns.

It is in this context that the aforementioned overreaches by SACSCOC make greatest sense. In 2021, concerned that Florida State University was soon to appoint former state house speaker Richard Corcoran as president, SACSCOC chief Belle Wheelan sent an unsolicited letter to the university denouncing the Republican’s candidacy. (Its thrust: “Nice accreditation you have there,” etc.) Something similar happened earlier that year, when the Georgia board of regents attempted to tap former (Republican) governor Sonny Perdue for the role of system chancellor. On that occasion, Wheelan threatened not only the University of Georgia’s accreditation but that of “ALL of the institutions within the System.” In both instances, her ostensible complaint was that the board’s actions were insufficiently “independent” from state politics. Yet even if one buys that Wheelan’s objection had to do with process rather than the potential appointment of conservatives, one is left to wonder how the public is meant to oversee public universities without the help of politically appointed trustees.

Though a third recent SACSCOC intrusion is, at a glance, smaller potatoes, it is perhaps the best illustration of the extent to which accreditors will go to protect progressive turf on campus. Earlier this year, when ’s Democratic governor attempted to wrest control of the UNC system from the state’s Republican legislature, Wheelan duly schlepped to Raleigh to lend her support. In addition to criticizing the existing legislature-appointed board of governors, she tripled down on the notion that a board may not be “controlled . . . by organizations or institutions separate from it” (read: elected officials and the voting public). Accompanying her remarks was an explicit threat to send UNC an admonishing “letter” of the sort received by Florida State and Georgia two years earlier. Whatever Congress had in mind in 1952, it can’t have been this.

To their credit, Republican officials are beginning to learn the score where accreditors’ politicization is concerned. A bill considered in the Texas legislature during the 2023 session would have discouraged accrediting bodies from “hinder[ing] or interfer[ing] with the authority of [a public university’s] governing board” — in part by allowing colleges to sue accreditors for “retaliatory” behavior. In the Tar Heel State, a bill containing similar “cause of action” language is still pending and will, if passed, surely give pause to aspiring Belle Wheelans. Both pieces of legislation would require public universities to switch accreditors on a regular basis, thereby encouraging competition and preventing overly cozy relationships between accreditors and administrators. Such a policy was passed into law in Florida last year in a bill that prevents “consecutive accreditation” and theoretically empowers the state board of education to declare certain accreditors verboten. SACSCOC officials may not need that extra sunscreen after all.

It will surprise no one to learn that the Biden administration is less than supportive of these state actions. In July 2022, a mere two months after Governor Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s higher-ed-reform bill, the Department of Education issued new guidance designed to prevent so-called accreditation-shopping. Under the new rule, colleges must obtain the agency’s approval before moving to a new accreditor. Institutions that violate this policy risk — what else? — losing access to federally backed student aid.

Because the new federal guidance clashes so directly with Florida’s 2022 reform, a legal battle was all but guaranteed the moment Education Secretary Miguel Cardona signed the order. Nevertheless, the Sunshine State’s response has been breathtaking in scope. Rather than merely challenging the Education Department’s new rule, DeSantis and other Florida officials have laid siege to the very foundation of the accreditation system, arguing in a June filing that Congress’s use of federal-loan “gatekeepers” violates the nondelegation doctrine established in Article I of the Constitution. Might DeSantis prevail? Stranger things have happened. And the Supreme Court has already agreed to hear SEC v. Jarkesy, which raises similar questions about regulatory-agency authority and could well lead to a renaissance in nondelegation-doctrine enforcement.

My own prediction? The accreditation system will survive judicial scrutiny, saved by a Roberts Court that places too great a value on stability. Still, it isn’t difficult to conclude that the accrediting bodies’ heyday is behind them. Like cat burglars, such organizations have long thrived in darkness, working their will beyond the sight of a clueless public. The spotlight lately shone on them by higher-ed reformers is doing them no favors, and it will not be switched off anytime soon.