President Trump’s new executive order, “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” makes clear that the Trump administration understands the importance of reforming our broken accreditation system. But as the order implicitly recognizes, much will have to happen before its objectives can be realized.
Most executive orders are phrased, at least in part, in general terms. It’s unavoidable. Among other things, this one orders the secretary of education to take “appropriate steps” to ensure that only “high-quality, high-value academic programs” get accredited. It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with that.
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The order offers several specific ways to accomplish this goal—like prohibiting unnecessary accreditation requirements that serve only to burden students with higher costs. That seems sensible enough. Still, it remains to be seen how Secretary of Education Linda McMahon carries out this broad mandate. She has many tools at her disposal. She can step up enforcement of current law, withdraw poorly conceived policies and regulations, promulgate new and better ones, work with Congress to improve the legislative framework for accreditation, and much more.
A few of the policies in the order warrant special comment.
Ending Illegal Race Preferences. In what could end up being its most consequential provision, the order zeroes in on accreditors that encourage institutions to engage in race-preferential admissions that violate the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023).
If I didn’t know better, I might wonder what all the fuss was about. Surely, accreditors know that they should not encourage colleges and universities to violate the law. They can’t possibly be doing that, can they? But, alas, some are. It’s a problem with a long history.
Race-preferential admissions policies have always been in conflict with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But when accreditors began pressuring schools to engage in them, the Supreme Court had not yet mustered the courage to issue a prohibition. The Court’s fractured decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) left colleges and universities enough wiggle room to discriminate by race if they wished. But many accreditors went further. They sought to make such discrimination mandatory.
The first case to come to public attention involved Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and its threat to de-accredit Baruch College, a constituent college of the City University of New York. In 1990, when the threat was issued, there was nothing wrong with Baruch’s library or its student-faculty ratio. Its science labs were tidy and well-equipped, its finances were in order, and its faculty, which included a Nobel laureate in economics, was excellent. Instead, Middle States faulted the school for an alleged failure to hire enough minority faculty members and to try hard enough to retain a racially diverse student body. Fortunately for Baruch, then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander came to its rescue by administering Middle States some of its own medicine—deferring the renewal of federal recognition of its status as an accreditor.
Ultimately, however, Secretary Alexander could not prevent this kind of pressure. Other accreditors soon joined in. Martin Trow, a distinguished UC Berkeley sociology professor and former chair of the National Advisory Committee on Accreditation, described the movement as “fiercely evangelical.” In his view, accreditors had adopted “nothing else than a political position which claims moral superiority to alternatives.”
In the mid-1990s, several prominent institutions—including Caltech, Stanford, and USC—publicly objected to the new “diversity” policy of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which they saw as a threat to their institutional autonomy. But most institutions submitted. As the practice became common, the opposition grew quiet.
Worst Offenders. The executive order singles out law school and medical school accreditors for special attention, as evidence shows that they have been the worst offenders. In the late 1990s, in a study conducted by Susan Welch and John Gruhl, 24 percent of medical schools and 31 percent of law schools admitted that they felt pressure from accreditors to engage in this kind of racial discrimination. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. That’s why the order directs the attorney general and secretary of education to determine whether to suspend or terminate their status as accreditors.
As these accreditors have long understood, when they insist that colleges and universities have a racially diverse student body or faculty, they are mandating that these institutions discriminate on the basis of race. The Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association, which jointly accredit medical schools as the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, or LCME, filed an amicus curiae brief in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). In it, they stated: “[T]here is simply no way to ensure meaningful diversity in medicine without considering race and ethnicity as one factor in the admissions process.” It would be hard to put the matter more bluntly.
Similarly, the American Bar Association, whose Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is the accreditor for law schools, stated in its Grutter amicus brief that adequate diversity cannot be achieved without preferences.
These accreditors have been encouraging unlawful conduct for a long time. In 1996, Californians voted to amend their state constitution to ban race-preferential admissions at state colleges and universities. In subsequent years, several other states followed this example. The ABA responded by declaring: “The requirement of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of gender, race or ethnicity in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school’s non-compliance with [our diversity and inclusion standards].” Given that the ABA was well aware that only preferential treatment would yield the racial diversity that it demanded, it’s hard to avoid a cynical interpretation of its directive: Perish the thought that your institution should violate the law by engaging in racial preferences. But by hook or by crook, you must come up with a student body and a faculty that are sufficiently diverse to meet our standards. If you succeed, we won’t ask questions about how you did it. If you fail, you will be de-accredited. Violation of state law was precisely what the ABA was encouraging.
Over the next two decades, a particularly egregious case would occasionally become public. For example, after the Grutter decision—which, like Bakke, declined to hold race-preferential admissions policies to be a violation of federal law—the ABA came close to de-accrediting George Mason University Law School, where several faculty members were known to oppose race-preferential admissions. The law school had no choice but to lower its standards, against the better judgment of its faculty, to admit more black students and thus please the ABA. The results were devasting. Fully 45 percent of black students admitted experienced academic failure, compared with only 4 percent of students of other races. As Dean Daniel Polsby put it in his pointed letter to the ABA: “We have an obligation to refrain from victimizing applicants, regardless of race or color, by admitting them to an educational program in which they appear likely to fail. This obligation is recognized in [the ABA’s accreditation standards] but we believe it exists independently.”
The ABA paid no heed to Polsby’s letter. Extensive freedom-of-information act requests over the last 20 years show that both the ABA and LCME have regularly cited schools for noncompliance with their diversity and inclusion policies. Nor is there reason to think that the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA has led them to change their ways. The only event that seems to have caused the ABA anxiety is the election of Donald Trump. It waited until February 21, 2025, to suspend its “Diversity and Inclusion” accreditation standard—nearly two years after SFFA. LCME’s standard remains in place.
Legislation Needed. The ABA’s use of the word “suspend” highlights a problem. Just as the ABA can revoke its suspension whenever it wishes, a subsequent president can easily revoke the accreditation executive order, along with executive branch action or policies adopted to further its objectives.
Moreover, the Higher Education Act now makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the secretary of education to impose new requirements on accreditors. Presumably, she can go after an accreditor that is actively encouraging lawlessness. But accreditors are likely to insist that their diversity and inclusion standards, as such, do not require violations of the law.
What’s needed is a clean requirement that prohibits accreditors from getting involved in any way in the racial or ethnic composition of student bodies or faculties at any college or university. Legislation is the Trump administration’s best bet for this. President Trump and Secretary McMahon can provide leadership in this regard—but Congress will need to act, too.
Legislation is always hard to pass, but in this case it might be easier than some think. Colleges and universities are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, the SFFA decision prohibits race-preferential admissions—and the Trump administration plans to enforce it. On the other, accreditors demand that they produce a racially diverse class and faculty. Legislation restraining accreditors from making such demands throws the schools a lifeline. It won’t require anything from the schools themselves. If they want to take the risk of an aggressive pro-preference stand, they can. The sole effect of the legislation will be to get the accreditors off their backs. They might be quietly grateful for that.
Intellectual Diversity. The part of the executive order that worries me involves intellectual diversity. It directs the secretary of education to take steps toward requiring accreditors to “support and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity among faculty.”
Those on the center-right might read this to mean that more classical liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and centrists will be hired. But don’t count on the accreditors or schools seeing it that way. More likely, the mandate for “intellectual diversity” will result in 101 flavors of leftism.
In law schools, for example, there could be no end to the number of “schools of thought” that this will generate. Identity politics will be the driver—and not just the usual critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. We’ll see new variations on the theme. Every savvy aspiring law professor will hold himself out as the champion of some emerging school of leftist or left-leaning thought. I doubt it will result in a single latter-day James Madison being hired.
It’s a mistake to think that current accreditors (or any plausible future ones) will promote a sensible concept of intellectual diversity. The alternative—more direct federal intervention into faculty hiring—is even worse. As vexing as colleges and universities can be, federal control over faculty hiring should be resisted.
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