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…
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…
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…