BY GRANT A. MINCY
Last year, when Tennessee’s HB2194 threatened to eliminate faculty peer review from tenure termination proceedings across the Tennessee Board of Regents system, those of us challenging the bill had a meaningful argument available: The bill created accreditation risk. SACSCOC’s Principles of Accreditation—especially principle 6.4 on academic freedom and principle 6.5 on faculty role in governance—gave us a floor to stand on, an external check that constrained what the legislature could demand without consequence. Our argument had force because the standards were explicit. SACSCOC’s draft principles would remove that floor.
This is not a discrete development. This is one half of a pincer.
On June 6, the Auburn University Board of Trustees dissolved the faculty senate, replaced representative governance with a presidentially appointed advisory body prohibited from issuing public statements, and gave itself explicit authority over curriculum and degree requirements—all passed unanimously, without faculty input. Most striking was language the board wrote directly into its new curriculum policy: “No external standard, recommendation, norm, action, or process shall limit the Board’s authority over institutional curriculum and course policy matters.” Auburn’s accreditor—SACSCOC—requires that faculty have primary responsibility for the content, quality, and effectiveness of the curriculum. The board wrote language specifically designed to preempt that requirement. Political actors across the region have concluded that accreditation standards are obstacles to be routed around, not floors to be respected.
The draft principles released by SACSCOC would render that preemption largely moot. They contain no mention of shared governance—a categorical shift in the theory of what accreditation is for. Current standards locate quality in a process: peer expertise, deliberative judgment, and distributed accountability. The draft principles, organized around “outcomes and results,” relocate quality assessment to endpoints measurable without reference to how they were produced or by whom. This is precisely the logic that external political actors have long sought to impose on accreditation, and precisely the logic the current standards were designed to resist. The AAUP has long held that shared governance is not procedural overhead but the institutional mechanism through which academic quality is produced and sustained. The Yale University committee on institutional integrity made the same point more recently: Governance structures that insulate academic decisions from political capture are preconditions of trustworthy educational outcomes, not alternatives to them.
The draft principles also replace academic freedom protections with policies on “free inquiry and intellectual autonomy.” This substitution is not an equivalent restatement. Academic freedom is a term of art with a specific, well-developed meaning in American higher education law and policy. It encompasses not only protected expression in the classroom and laboratory but the freedom to speak as citizens on institutional and public matters—to criticize administrative decisions, to advocate on matters of governance, and to participate in faculty senate proceedings. These are precisely the forms of expression that have come under legislative pressure across the nation, and they are the forms that shared governance depends upon. Replacing “academic freedom” with “free inquiry” removes the doctrinal foundation for protecting them—a foundation with deep roots in constitutional jurisprudence. The Supreme Court recognized academic freedom as a special concern of the First Amendment, applied to state institutions through the Fourteenth Amendment, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) and Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957). SACSCOC accredits public institutions bound by these constitutional protections. The standards should reflect, not retreat from, that constitutional floor.
The draft principles also loosen faculty credential requirements in ways that compound the governance problem. When hiring decisions are no longer anchored to rigorous credential requirements and peer-driven processes, the door opens to administrative appointment of faculty based on institutional convenience or ideological alignment rather than curricular expertise. Auburn demonstrated this logic directly: Its new advisory body may include nonfaculty members selected in part on the basis of “collegiality”—a criterion that structurally favors those unlikely to challenge administrative decisions over those with the deepest curricular expertise. The result is not merely a less credentialed faculty. The result is a faculty whose composition reflects administrative priorities rather than the academic mission.
None of this emerged from nowhere. In 2025, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the Commission for Public Higher Education—a state-run accreditor designed to compete with SACSCOC. The commission’s chief academic officer later wrote that CPHE “need not accredit all or even most public universities to bring long-overdue reform to higher education.” SACSCOC’s new president took office pledging deference to state authority. A DeSantis appointee cochaired the principles review committee. The draft principles that followed are designed, in the committee’s own words, to “keep focus on outcomes and results—not process for its own sake.” Whatever the reasons for these revisions, their effect is to ratify rather than resist the pressure that independent accreditation exists to check.
The public comment window has now closed, but SACSCOC is still working on this policy, and the decisions that follow will define what the commission is for.
I teach in an Appalachian river valley community college. My students are first-generation, working-class, often Pell-eligible. They come to us not merely for job training but for the kind of education that builds a person—the deliberative, expert, peer-accountable process through which a community develops shared intellectual capacity. Accreditation standards that protect shared governance and academic freedom are not bureaucratic overhead. They are the institutional architecture through which colleges and universities remain capable of producing the independent inquiry, critical thought, and civic formation that their public purposes require.
SACSCOC has demonstrated that it can hold these standards against political pressure—the commission has previously opened inquiries when state officials interfered in institutional affairs and when administrators attempted to suppress faculty speech. That history matters. The floor is being removed. SACSCOC still has the standing and the precedent to hold it.
Grant A. Mincy is associate professor of biology and faculty senate president at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. He also serves as vice president for community colleges at the AAUP Tennessee state conference. He has written previously in Inside Higher Ed and the Hechinger Report on the architecture of faculty governance under legislative pressure.
