BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ
The recent announcement of the founding of the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE) reveals another “axis of power” in the multiwebbed right-wing war on the US university. Though the new body entails only the seven southern public university systems of Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas A & M, and Louisiana, its newly released business plan announces the ambitious goal to remake the rules of the accrediting process anywhere and everywhere in the United States. Emboldened by the elimination of the regional accreditation system during Trump 1.0, CPHE does not merely seek to displace the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS). Aiming to become “a recognized national institutional accrediting agency,” CPHE assumes that “many public state colleges and universities will likely want to switch accreditation.” That this accrediting body has been started in the South is, however, no coincidence. MAGA Republicans control the legislature in every one of these states, and they, therefore, possess the power to select members of governing boards. Over the last twenty years, “conservatives have made it increasingly clear that they think governing boards of public institutions should answer to no one but themselves.” As a new accrediting body accountable to these states, it will be overseen by the very same politicians who have passed or are in the process of passing laws against divisive concepts; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and any other academic norms or institutions that they disdain. The timing is perfect for DeSantis to spread his corrupted revision of public higher education to other parts of the country.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that no one responsible for the daily functions of university accreditation seemed aware of this new development. States like Florida and North Carolina had already passed laws that would have forced their public universities to identify new accreditation agencies every one or two accreditation cycles. But with the CPHE’s founding, the earlier strategy for mandating that universities leave SACS for other extant agencies is being swapped out for a more comprehensive and invasive solution. This U-turn comes after Trump’s April 2025 executive order on accreditation, which undermines accrediting agencies’ independence if they do not comply with the administration’s weaponization of civil rights to penalize institutions for engaging in “unlawful discriminatory practice.” Significantly, CPHE’s seven-point list of how it aims to fill the current “market gaps” in the accreditation sphere mirrors almost exactly what Trump’s order makes possible. CPHE may have been called into being because DeSantis and the North Carolina board of governors hate SACS, but technocratic neoliberal types, like UNC system President Peter Hans, see in it an opportunity to further entrench performance-based funding metrics into their systems: “The new body would focus on student success and academics, which could include metrics such as the return on investment for academic programs.” The seventh of CPHE’s “market gap fillers” is telling: “Eliminate Divisive Ideological Standards.” Hans is more than willing to tether neoliberal aims to right-wing antiwokeness through the parlance of neutrality. “The vision for this effort really is to offer a streamlined, non-ideological approach to accreditation.” Other justifications for the expensive undertaking of creating a new agency in a market flush with agencies include reducing student debt, improving workforce preparation, and eliminating red tape. With the Big Ugly Bill’s decimation of the student loan system, this means pushing vast numbers of students faster through their programs, “within four years or less.” In short, this rogue accreditor could make itself attractive by lowering standards and saving money for financially starved universities.
The new body’s existence will ultimately bolster the ideologies of southern state legislators who have passed or are in the process of passing anti-DEI bills, which ban not only the concept of DEI but leave open the banning of other “divisive concepts.” In North Carolina we have a shot of upholding our Democratic governor’s recent veto of the state anti-DEI bill, but if a slim majority overrides the veto this week, instructors and students in the UNC system could see deeper state encroachment into curriculum and classroom. Republican state lawmakers—referencing the videos recorded by right-wing Accuracy in Media to entrap UNC system staff as “proof” of staff members’ commitment to DEI values—just announced a board of governors directive mandating that every campus board of trustees form committees to surveil and erase any leftover traces of DEI values. Through bold and bizarre overreach, they are forcing trustees to become the commissars of “non-ideological” university life. Significantly, the updating of “institutional webpages and mission statements for programs, curriculum, and objectives” is “to continue until . . . ‘specific oversight [by the board of governors is] no longer needed.’” Such combined efforts to take control at federal, state, and local levels could result in greater faculty self-censorship curtailing teaching and learning of controversial issues and difficult history.
The salvo of Mike Collins’s recent Academe Blog post bears repeating: “The Trump administration is waging a highly successful war on knowledge and its pursuit and dissemination, disguised as a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); antisemitism; and the lack of viewpoint diversity.” Democratic Representative Brandon Lofton stated during a house committee “debate” on the North Carolina anti-DEI bill, “You cannot promote freedom of speech by restricting it. You cannot promote freedom of thought by restricting it.” I might add that you cannot promote “viewpoint diversity” through a zero-sum political takeover, aimed not at “neutrality” (a magic word with an aura of objectivity) but rather at neutralizing the existing diversity of voices peopling higher education. Having written the principles of academic freedom and university self-governance into its mission and having acted on them, SACS made itself vulnerable to a right-wing backlash. CPHE has now written these principles out of the accreditation equation. All the practices associated with academic freedom, the bedrock of university intellectual life, need massive defense now and over the long term. As Timothy Reese Cain has noted, “Academic freedom itself is necessary for the entire accreditation process to work.” In the name of CPHE’s spurious claim to “true peer review,” we are being unknowingly transported back to the Gilded Age when politicians regularly sought to force their will on colleges. The war on knowledge is tied to intensified privatization of public education, or as Jason Read put it, “an attempt to bring the production of knowledge in [even greater] alignment with the mode of production, to have theories meet the practices of contemporary capitalism.”
CPHE outlined an “aggressive timeline” of June 2028 for its official recognition by the federal Department of Education, As Matthew Boedy recently wrote, we have a window of opportunity to act. Those in power have conspired long enough. Now it’s our turn. We are in the process of creating political and solidaristic synergies from the bottom up as well as from the top of our best higher education associations and unions downwards—integrating joy and love into our conspiring every step of the way.
Audrey Berlowitz is a scholar of education studies and organizes with the AAUP’s North Carolina state conference. This piece emerged through conversational “conspiring” at the AAUP-AFT 2025 Summer Institute and elsewhere.
