President Donald Trump has acted on his campaign threat to weaponize the college accreditation system against schools that don’t bend to his MAGA worldview, signing an executive order last week that targets the independent groups that set standards for colleges and universities and allow them to apply for things like federal funding.
“College accreditation” is the kind of topic that might put many Americans to sleep upon first mention. But there’s a reason Republicans are so obsessed with it in their war on American universities, which Vice President JD Vance has characterized as “the enemy.” While campaigning for president, Trump said the accreditation system would be the GOP’s “secret weapon” to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” And in the lead-up to last year’s presidential election, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., was recorded discussing how a Trump administration — which is now targeting college campuses in a noncredible and authoritarian crackdown — could withhold such accreditation.
These were deranged plans, but Republicans are now in position to act on them.
While campaigning, Trump said the accreditation system would be the GOP’s “secret weapon” to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.”
The accreditation executive order seems ripe for a legal challenge if put into practice. Basically, it claims Trump’s administration has the power to punish accreditation organizations — “including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition” — if they require colleges to participate in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the administration falsely categorizes as “unlawful discrimination.” The order specifically instructs the attorney general and the education secretary to similarly investigate whether to pull recognition from accreditors such as the American Bar Association — which accredits law schools — or top accreditors for medical schools over “unlawful” DEI requirements.
Aside from that, the order calls for changes to the accreditor recognition review process and said it will become easier for institutions “to change accreditors to ensure institutions are not forced to comply with standards that are antithetical to institutional values and mission.”
Fundamentally, Trump’s executive order seems to be about two things: making it easier for MAGA-aligned schools, which may have justifiably been denied accreditation in the past, to become formally recognized — and creating hurdles for other schools to do the same, even if their supposed offense was having been interested in fostering a diverse campus and reaping all the benefits that come from it.
Notably, the order says one of the new guiding principles for accreditation is that colleges must promote “intellectual diversity amongst faculty in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.” As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell highlighted well in a recent episode of “The Last Word,” the ostensibly anti-diversity Trump administration sure loves diversity when it means imposing ideological requirements that could force universities to hire more conservatives.
And that just makes this EO all the more dubious. This is an attempt at thought policing by the highest office in the United States.
Unless you believe the founder of the now-defunct Trump University somehow conjured an interest in maintaining the intellectual rigor of America’s educational institutions, it’s hard not to see the ulterior motives at play here.