The following is a letter submitted by Nancy MacLean, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, to the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE) concerning the CPHE’s proposed evidentiary guidance for accreditation standards. The CPHE is a new accrediting body aimed at first implementing their standards at certain public universities in the South, but the recent trend of state and national leaders embracing accreditation as a tool for furthering political attacks on higher education suggests that the adoption of such standards may have national consequences.
To whom it may concern,
I write as a newly retired faculty member with thirty-five years of experience, including as a department chair and participant in many program reviews, to express my grave concerns about the Commission on Public Higher Education (CPHE). For an accreditor to have legitimacy, it must be independent.
Yet CPHE has never been independent. Created by an aggressively partisan politician, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, it is a political enterprise rather than one committed to academic excellence, which requires academic freedom and institutional autonomy for colleges and universities. DeSantis has himself led efforts to undermine academic freedom and institutional autonomy at New College of Florida and throughout the state’s public higher education system, as documented by numerous journalists, scholars, and the AAUP.
So, too, the state governments supporting CPHE are not a random collection of US states, but rather Republican-run, heavily gerrymandered states (Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas), that misrepresent the will of the states’ voters. It is further notable that most of them were once members of the Confederacy, where democracy is being undermined by such gerrymandering and voter suppression measures.
In fact, the CPHE represents a strategy devised by a whole network of think tanks and other organizations funded by conservative mega-donors who have a long track record of trying to radically transform higher education and governance writ large. These include the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
These allied agents have engaged in series of sequenced interrelated plays to disrupt and remake America’s higher education system, until now the strongest in the world. The plays include defaming faculty and disinforming the public about what happens in colleges and universities, organizing donors and trustees to demand ruptures in how these institutions make choices and govern themselves, and enlisting the powers of state government (where controlled by their partisan allies) to drive top-down implementation of the new agenda.
Why revolutionize a higher education system so many counties have sought to emulate? We can follow the money to find out. The American Enterprise Institute is a longtime recipient of interested contributions from the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry, and the Koch network of arch-right corporate donors.
In short, all the evidence to date suggests that the CPHE is a partisan political body that aims to transform higher education in a manner desired by Republican extremists and the donors who back them. It does not appear to be a good-faith actor seeking to independently evaluate quality but rather a Trojan horse determined to use any power awarded it to bend public colleges and universities to the agenda of its allies.
