Resistance Comes to Higher Education

The threat of lifting accreditation is a favorite weapon in Trump’s war against universities. Without accreditation, universities can’t get direct federal education aid, research grants, Pell Grants, or student loans. Basically, they would have to capitulate to Trump’s blackmail or close their doors.

Trump has referred to accreditation as his secret weapon. “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” he said in a July 2023 campaign video. “We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

Central to the administration’s strategy is to use a history of DEI requirements as the basis for lifting accreditation. As Trump ally Robert Eitel, president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, wrote in a Tuesday op-ed in The Washington Post, “The good news is that the Education Department is on strong legal footing if it were to withdraw recognition from accreditors whose standards steer institutions to discriminatory behavior and policies,” namely DEI. (So much for Jeff Bezos’s pledge that Post op-eds would defend personal liberties.)

But in fact, the good news is nothing of the sort. Trump is all bluster and bluff.

Despite Trump’s saber-rattling, the process of withdrawing Education Department recognition of an accreditation agency is laborious. Nor can the government compel an outside agency to discredit a university.

All of these safeguards represent the administrative state and the separate protections of civil society at their best. The stubborn realities of due process are why Trump and his allies want to destroy the “deep state.”

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Removing accreditation from even a fraudulent university is a drawn-out process, and cases often end up in court. Amazingly, the University of Phoenix, which settled a false advertising case with the FTC for $191 million, is still accredited, as are several other dubious for-profit universities. (These other flaws in the accreditation process are their own story, but not for the reasons Trump claims.)

Last month, in a Federal Register Notice, the Education Department proposed to make it easier for new accrediting agencies to win recognition, and for colleges to switch accreditors. But the process it proposes is a gradual and consensual one, and the Department recognizes that it can’t force colleges to switch accreditors. It is a far cry from Trump’s fantasies. The Department recognized these realities when it termed its proposed process a “negotiated rulemaking.”

Meanwhile, the series of threats against universities has awakened a sleeping giant. After an early round of blackmail, in which Trump picked off universities one at a time, most shamefully Columbia, more and more universities have appreciated that giving into blackmail never works. Harvard, in spite of itself, has been resisting, and winning, in court.

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Now, major universities and other higher education organizations have come together to found the Alliance for Higher Education and the Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education. In late January they held an inaugural meeting, fittingly called Moving Out of Defense. Pushing back on Trump’s accreditation threats will be a key project.

It took universities a while to realize their collective power. The more they move out of defense, the less likely it is that Trump will be able to coerce them one at a time. When the story is finally written of how America contained and then reversed the predations of Trumpism, the role of energized civil society will be a key chapter.