BY GRANT MINCY

Buried inside the Department of Education’s proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule sits a single provision, § 602.23(j), that reads on the surface like a narrow housekeeping matter. The provision tells accreditors not to second-guess how a state appoints the members of a public college’s governing board. Appointment mechanics are properly a matter of state law, and the regulatory text itself says nothing more than that.

The department’s own preamble says considerably more, describing § 602.23(j) as directing accreditors to “refrain from interfering with institutional governance decisions that fall within the rightful purview of State governments, boards of trustees, or similar governing bodies, limiting their role to advisory purposes only.” Not only appointment mechanics but also governance decisions, with accreditors limited to an advisory role in reviewing them.

What is at stake in that distinction is not abstract. The distinction determines whether shared governance survives. Shared governance is not a faculty prerogative asserted against an administration; the practice is a working relationship between faculty members and administrations that serves both and serves the institution as a whole. Faculty, by the nature of the work, stand closest to students, and shared governance is the structure through which that proximity shapes institutional decisions. At a community college like mine in particular, this relationship extends beyond the campus itself. Our students come from the neighborhoods surrounding our campus, and they will remain part of this community—as neighbors, employees, parents, and civic participants—long after they leave our classrooms. A shared, democratic governance structure, tested through the ordinary friction of faculty and an administration working together, produces a stronger institution than one where governance decisions are imposed by executive edict.

Shared governance is not a novel or untested arrangement. The practice has stood as the operating norm of American higher education for roughly sixty years, formalized in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. During that period, American colleges and universities—including public institutions accountable to state legislatures and governing boards—became the most sought-after system of higher education in the world. That did not happen despite shared governance; it happened in large part because of that structure.

That sixty-year record is precisely what this proposed rule now puts at risk. The regulatory text never says accreditors are limited to an advisory role. Nor does it define what counts as a governance decision within a state’s “rightful purview,” as opposed to a matter an accrediting agency may properly review under the agency’s own standards for shared governance and academic freedom.

None of this is theoretical for AAUP members in Tennessee. In 2026, the state legislature passed House Bill 2194, restructuring faculty discipline procedures by statute at every public college and university in the state, including the flagship University of Tennessee system. The law stripped away peer-review protections that had governed termination proceedings for decades. Faculty across the state spent months, chapter by chapter, working to rebuild whatever due-process protections the  policy still left in their hands—work that succeeded, in part, because the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), the regional accreditor for Tennessee institutions, still had standing to ask whether the resulting policies met the standards institutional accreditation exists to protect. In that same period, Auburn University’s faculty senate was dissolved outright, with no faculty vote and no public deliberation. Under the broad reading the preamble of the proposed AIM rule invites, an accreditor might not have been permitted to ask a single question about that decision.

This tension is not confined to federal rulemaking, either. SACSCOC itself, now operating under the trade name “The Commission on Colleges and Universities,” ran their own comment period this past summer, and faculty members and faculty senate leadership across the region raised concerns that SACSCOC’s draft accreditation principles moved toward weakening shared governance standards in parallel. The two processes are not the same fight, but a federal rule that reads § 602.23(j) as broadly as the preamble suggests would remove the very floor that gives regional accreditors like SACSCOC standing to hold that line at all—leaving faculty with neither a regional nor a federal backstop.

Shared governance is a form of democratic self-governance—a commons that a public institution holds in trust for the students, families, and communities the institution serves. A rule that permits the commons to be enclosed at a state’s discretion, foreclosed from outside review, cedes the stewardship of an American public good to whichever political majority holds power in a given legislative session, with no external check and no obligation to answer for the result.

The department is required by law to read and consider every comment filed before finalizing this rule. Comments are due September 21, 2026, submitted through the Federal eRulemaking Portal at regulations.gov, under Docket ID ED-2025-OPE-1042. The department has specifically invited commenters to cite sections, explain their reasoning, and propose alternative language—an invitation AAUP chapters, faculty senates, and individual members are well positioned to answer with the same specificity the department has asked for. A rule this consequential to shared governance should not become final because too many faculty members assumed someone else would say so.

Grant A. Mincy is faculty senate president at Pellissippi State Community College and vice president for community colleges for the Tennessee AAUP conference.