Are DEI Policies Making a Mockery of Accreditation in Higher Education?
“The real problem is that those running accrediting agencies are cut from the same cloth as those running American educational institutions.”
Teresa R. Manning of the National Association of Scholars seems to think so.
She writes at American Greatness:
Accreditation? A Woke, Good-Cop-Bad-Cop Scam
Congress may soon revisit the federal law governing post-secondary education, the Higher Education Act of 1965. If it does, Representative Burgess Owens (R-Utah) wants the effort to expose and correct the murky mischief of our accreditation system. That system was supposed to ensure institutional quality before schools could get federal funds like Title IV student loans. But now accreditors want to impose left-wing politics instead, while academic rigor goes out the window.
Owens’ bill, titled Accreditation for College Excellence (“ACE”), would prohibit accrediting agencies from imposing politics on schools as part of accreditation. Such political litmus tests or “loyalty oaths” are now actually routinely demanded by schools themselves of prospective faculty and students. For example, universities have begun to insist that professors pledge allegiance to diversity ideology—aka “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or “DEI.” DEI is a euphemism for pitting Americans against each other based on race and it often amounts to open, reverse discrimination against those of European descent and/or Christian heritage, aka “whites.” (Some schools actually use brown cartoon figures on their websites to show which ethnic groups get favored as “diverse.’)
The ACE is valuable since it would prevent accreditors from piling on to this diversity bandwagon and it also sheds light on the obscure area of accreditation. But bad accreditors and bad-actor schools have deeper roots than the current “diversity” craze. So policy corrections must also dig deeper if they’re to be effective.
The real problem is that those running accrediting agencies are cut from the same cloth as those running American educational institutions. Unfortunately, these people are anti-American and anti-Western Civilization ideologues intent on feeding that ideology to everyone while enriching themselves in the process. This leaves American students politicized and ignorant, and American taxpayers frustrated and poorer. The winners? Diversity bureaucrats peddling anti-Americanism.
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“Are DEI policies making a mockery of accreditation in higher education?”
Yes.
They have made mockeries out of American education for decades—where have all y’all been? Take medicine—the LCME (Liaison Committee on Medical Education), the sole accreditor of MD (allopathic medicine) programs in the US, has for years bent to whatever demands the AMA (which represents < 15% of US physicians—and only the most leftist at that!) made of it. LCME has been informally called “Let Commies Medically Educate” for years now.