BY KATIE RAINWATER

In 2011, Eric Barron, the then-president of Florida State University, gave a presentation to FSU’s board of trustees. His talk concerned how Florida could adopt and exceed the “7 Breakthrough Solutions” that the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative, market-fundamentalist think tank, had put forward to reform higher education. The seventh solution concerned accreditation: Florida could “establish an alternative model for accreditation or act to make the SACS [Southern Association of Colleges and Schools] accreditation more outcomes-based” focused on “results, and less extensively on inputs and processes.”

Fast forward fourteen years and Florida established the alternative model for accreditation. Last June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced a new state-run accreditation body, the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), designed to upend the so-called accreditation cartel. This June, with SACSCOC’s* release of draft accreditation standards, it is clear that attempts to remake SACSCOC accreditation into an “outcomes-based” review are well underway.

Accreditation, a requirement for higher education institutions to access student aid, is a peer-reviewed process adopted to safeguard quality. To become and remain accredited, institutions must meet certain standards, which have historically included policies guarding against undue external influence and protecting academic freedom. SACSCOC’s support for these standards over the years, as evident in investigations launched when former Governor Rick Scott involved himself in a university-level presidential search and when administrators at the University of Florida attempted to prevent faculty from testifying as expert witnesses in a case against the state, attracted the ire of Florida state officials who responded with legislation statutorily requiring institutions to break their relationships with SACS.

In 2025, when Stephen Pruitt replaced the long-serving Belle Wheelan as president of SACSCOC, he took a conciliatory stance, announcing that his leadership would be premised on the recognition of state authority. Among Pruitt’s first priorities was revising SACSCOC accreditation standards. Florida Polytechnic University President Devin Stephenson—DeSantis’ appointment to the council of the Southern Regional Education Board, which Pruitt led prior to SACSCOC—was chosen as cochair of the principles review committee.

Recalling the aims laid out by Barron, the SACSCOC draft principles—released the first week of June—are designed to “keep focus on outcomes and results—not process for its own sake.” In this focus, SACSCOC is embracing a long-term goal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a right-wing organization which has engaged in a decades-long struggle to wrest governance authority from faculty and reduce government expenditures on higher education. An early critic of accreditation, ACTA devised the language for disparaging the current accreditation system—a “monopoly,” a “cartel”—that is repeated by politicians like DeSantis and appears in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, as well as the frame (“evaluate results, not inputs”) informing the draft SACSCOC principles.

Among the inputs that ACTA has identified as not bearing directly on student learning are faculty senates. Unlike the current SACSCOC standards, which are informed by the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the draft principles contain no mention of shared governance. In this respect, they go further than CPHE standards, which nod to shared governance albeit in a troublingly qualified way.

Eschewing the bedrock of the university, the standards replace policies on academic freedom with policies “protecting the principles of free inquiry and intellectual autonomy.” This cannot be regarded as an insignificant semantic revision in a context in which right-wing activists like DeSantis’ former 2024 campaign aid Nate Hochman (fired for producing a video with Nazi imagery) have argued that academic freedom is a “progressive concept” that should be replaced by “a more authentic understanding of free inquiry” in which knowledge production and dissemination is constrained by deference to supposed eternal truths. Moreover, academic freedom extends beyond free inquiry, as it is also recognized to protect the speech of faculty as citizens and faculty criticism of institutional affairs.

Other draft principles read like a green light for the cost-cutting “reforms” pushed by right-wing organizations like TPPF, the Cato Institute, the James G. Martin Center, and the Heritage Foundation, which have collaborated for more than a decade to dismantle the existing accreditation system claiming that this was necessary for achieving other higher ed “reforms.” These reforms include speeding time to degree by reducing credit hour requirements for general education (currently fifteen hours for AA degrees and thirty hours for BA degrees) and removing restrictions against courses focused on knowledge specific to a particular profession counting for general education credit. The 120-credit hour requirement for the BA degree would also be removed, paving the way for an expansion of the ninety-credit hour degree programs championed by the Right and since 2024 permitted with certain guardrails by all accreditors . Requirements for sufficient numbers of full-time faculty are replaced with requirements for sufficient numbers of “qualified” faculty, and qualifications are redefined to minimize the importance of PhDs.

Last June, Sonny Purdue, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia, forwarded the announcement of CPHE’s formation to Stephen Pruitt. “FYI only,” Purdue wrote, “as you are aware this planning took place prior to your announcement! Had we known, I feel that I would have been a less enthusiastic participant!” An article by Jason Jewell, Florida’s chief academic officer and a vice chair of CPHE, suggests that changing the practice of existing accreditors has been the point of CPHE all along. “Legacy accreditors are taking notice of CPHE’s appeal and are beginning to signal imminent reforms to their own practices in an effort to reduce the incentives for their members to decamp for greener pastures…CPHE need not accredit all or even most public universities to bring long-overdue reform to higher education.”

We are seeing the unfolding of a decades-long effort by right-wing think tanks to weaken the accreditation system. This attack includes creating new agencies as well as watering down existing ones. At stake is a systemic effort to make higher education more vulnerable to political interference and to cost-cutting, quality reducing measures.

Feedback on SACSCOC draft standards is being accepted through June 19.

* Note: SACSCOC will be renamed as “The Commission on Colleges and Universities” as of September 1, 2026.

Katie Rainwater teaches sociology at Florida International University.