A Stealth Threat to Academic Freedom That We Can Stop in Its Tracks: Ron DeSantis wants to use accreditation to control public higher ed.

Friends:

Most of us have seen the headline-grabbing attacks on higher education from Donald Trump and his allies—threats to strip funding, weaponized accusations of discrimination, and efforts to silence dissent. Those are serious enough. But beneath the surface lies a quieter, potentially more damaging move: reshaping the system of accreditation that governs colleges and universities.

Accreditation might sound bureaucratic, but it is what allows institutions to access federal funds. It also safeguards faculty rights, academic freedom, and shared governance by requiring policies that ensure faculty participation in decision-making. Without these standards, universities become far more vulnerable to political interference.

Enter Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Along with allies in other states, he has spearheaded the creation of the Commission of Public Higher Education (CPHE), a new accrediting body designed to place public higher education under partisan political control. Unlike long-standing independent accreditors, this group’s vague standards and “efficiency” rhetoric would strip away faculty protections while allowing administrations and politicians to consolidate power. Accreditation would become a weapon to punish disfavored programs and reward ideological loyalty.

This is not a distant possibility. CPHE already has a draft set of principles, a business plan, and state leaders lining up to participate. Federal recognition could come as soon as 2027, but schools may begin joining much sooner. If successful, this move would alter higher education governance for a generation, reducing institutions to state-run agencies with little independence, eroding both academic freedom and democracy itself.

The good news is that resistance is still possible. Faculty, students, and allies can pressure campus leaders to slow down adoption of CPHE, giving time for advocacy at the state and federal level. National lawmakers and advisory bodies can push back against CPHE’s approval process. As Matthew Boedy of the AAUP warns, this is a “fast-moving train”—but one that can be stopped if enough people recognize the stakes and act collectively.

For a deeper dive into why accreditation matters and how it is being weaponized, I strongly encourage readers to check out the Academic Freedom on the Line podcast episode, "Accreditation," featuring John Warner and Bob Shireman (June 6, 2025). It unpacks how accreditation has historically safeguarded faculty rights and why today’s threats demand urgent attention.

I agree that the strongest argument for not joining CPHE is that it would diminish the power of the presidency.

Accreditation has always been the guardrail that protects universities from becoming tools of political power. To let DeSantis and others seize it for partisan ends would be to surrender the very independence that makes higher education a pillar of democracy.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A Stealth Threat to Academic Freedom That We Can Stop in Its Tracks: Ron DeSantis wants to use accreditation to control public higher ed. 

JOHN WARNER |SEP 02, 2025

Donald Trump’s overt threats to higher education - stripping them of funding, making bogus accusations of discrimination - are headline news. These threats are real, severe, and must be resisted. But these are not the only current threats, and perhaps not even the most consequential threats long term. Executive actions can be reversed by a different executive.

But a changing of the governance and bureaucratic mechanisms that dictate the structures by which higher education institutions are expected to operate could have a literal generational effect on the rights of students, faculty, and staff working at colleges and universities.

The mechanism for enacting and cementing these changes is the system of accreditation. We issued an earlier, general warning about how this mechanism could be used to erase faculty rights in a podcast episode with Bob Shireman of The Century Foundation.


This week, Donald Trump issued yet another attack on institutional independence through a Department of Education letter declaring that Columbia University had violated the standards of accreditation and should be required to “establish a plan to come into compliance.”

The threats have moved well beyond the theoretical with an under-the-radar effort spearheaded by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to create a new accrediting body, the “Commission of Public Higher Education,” which is specifically designed to put public higher education institutions across multiple states under the overt control of political partisans, with few (or any) allowances for faculty freedom or governance.

Matthew Boedy has been tracking and issuing warnings about this initiative, which has significant momentum, but can still be resisted. Previously, Boedy published a warning at the Academe blog, “The Time to Act Is Now,” and we figured we should use this platform to help spread the word of the threat and give people more information about how they can resist these attacks on academic freedom and our democratic society.

Matthew Boedy is the president of the Georgia conference of the AAUP. He is a professor at the University of North Georgia and the author of the new book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy

John Warner: I think this situation is going to take a little bit of unpacking for people to appreciate its meaning and urgency. What are the origins of the Commission for Public Higher Education?

Matthew Boedy: The origins lie in the first Trump administration, when the Department of Education began proposing to simplify the accreditor review process. That slow-moving policy change was supercharged by Project 2025 and the executive order Trump signed in April. The order echoed language in the sweeping manifesto about the power of accreditation agencies. To kneecap that power, the order opened the door for state governments to start their own accreditors, or serve as accreditors themselves. The Commission for Public Higher Education is the fruit of that. In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, along with leaders of university systems in other southern states, announced the creation of the CPHE.

JW: Let’s back up a bit. My view is that accreditation is something faculty are aware of, but what we know tends to be narrow, focused on the specific demands of accreditors passed down by administrators as they do their work of satisfying the accreditation criteria. But what is the meaning of accreditation? How does accreditation impact the institution and the work and rights of faculty?

MB: Accreditation has an enormous impact. It allows a school access to federal funds. This is why the Department of Education has a process for assessing accreditation agencies - it doles out the reward for following its rules. The accreditation process includes making sure schools have the needed amount of faculty and policies that mandate some level of faculty involvement in decision-making, especially about academic topics. Accreditation standards also can include mandating policies on faculty evaluation and academic freedom. While faculty rights are often defined in state and campus policies, the demand for those policies comes from accreditation.

JW: And what is the structure of the system of accreditation? Who funds it? Where do the priorities that accreditors bring to institutions come from? Why are there even so many different accrediting bodies?

MB: Accreditation is run by independent, third-party organizations such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools or SACS. It is funded by the fees paid by the schools to which it offers accreditation. The principles and standards of accreditation are based on federal law and regulations. But they are also developed by the member institutions. The history of higher education accreditation was regional for decades - hence the SACS outline throughout the South. But that was erased in recent years and schools are now not limited to their regional accreditation. That may make it seem like there are a lot of agencies, but it merely means any school can choose from several regional agencies or create their own, as they have done in the South.

JW: So, as I understand it, what DeSantis is attempting is to establish a new accreditation agency that will significantly constrain faculty rights. What’s the mechanism? How will it work?

MB: The new accreditation group led by Florida uses the same mechanism as other agencies - a statement of accreditation principles, a board of directors, and an accreditation process. But this new group has argued that its completion is too burdensome to schools, forcing too much paperwork adhering to too many standards for too much money. Efficiency is their goal. This would constrain faculty rights because the vagueness and limited nature of fewer standards would give more power to administrations, both at the campus and state level. Secondly, the accreditation process through those standards has become weaponized to insert conservative ideology that could “punish universities whose faculty or academic programs they disapprove of, and to reward universities that promote their ideological preferences.”

JW: What I’m hearing is that this brand of accreditation would eliminate, as much as possible, any independent authority for the institution itself. College and university administrations would essentially be agents of the state itself, beholden to the ideology of the executive. If that’s right, it sounds pretty authoritarian to me.

MB: It’s why I call it a “state-run” accreditation system for a state-run higher education system. There are layers of influence here, but as we have seen in Florida, boards and governors have tremendous power, and they aim to expand that power.

JW: How far along are they? What is the timeline like, what hoops to they have to jump through, and what is the likelihood of success for that hoop jumping?

MB: The group’s business plan lays out an aggressive timeline to which they are keeping. While federal recognition may be two years away, the group already has a draft of accreditation principles it is shopping around for feedback, and some states like Georgia have already publicly named the person they want on the new group’s board. The creation of a board would be followed by the hiring of a chief executive. And then taking on its first school as a client. All those are planned to be completed by January. The federal approval process begins as soon as late 2027. That is based in part on showing the federal government that it has a legal accreditation process and has accredited schools.

JW: Let’s imagine a scenario where DeSantis gets what he’s after. What can we expect for institutions accredited by the Commission for Public Education?

MB: Let’s remind everyone that DeSantis has already completed much of his goals for higher education. And those laws passed in Florida began to start conflicts with its accreditor. This is why the CPHE was formed. Then imagine a new accreditation agency hand-picked by DeSantis and his allies in other states. This would effectively neuter the power of accreditation and allow schools to move faster and break more things. Closing programs, opening new ones, building new campuses, etc. All without a hefty accreditation review. And, of course, continuing to limit the role of faculty in decision-making. But Florida is not the only player in this arena. Federal lawmakers and Trump could not only end the Department of Education but move its accreditation approval functions to other agencies, effectively giving them little oversight. And if the state runs these new, freer agencies with the combination of new state laws like those in Florida, we have a totally different landscape.

JW: What power do we have to stop this before it gets further down the track? What is the approach to organizing, and then what actions should the organized be taking?

MB: This is a fast-moving train. While only one state, Florida, has officially voted to join the new group, others have already made moves to show they are in it. Stopping that official vote to join may be impossible. And because these states are weaponizing the independence of college systems - to make them free from ideology they don’t like - getting an audience with a Board of Governors or similar group for faculty may also be impossible. There could be pressure brought to bear on state lawmakers who have some say over university systems. But while not impossible, many of these lawmakers in the states who have joined to build the CPHE don’t like higher education for various reasons. One irony in this whole saga is that some states have passed laws mandating colleges change accreditors every five years. If your state has such a law, and has also said it is joining the new group, that presents an opportunity for advocacy.

While the CPHE is a Southern-focused group now, it wants to accredit schools across the nation. That calls for a national strategy. Federal lawmakers certainly could exert more pressure on the Department of Education to stop the approval process. There is also an outside advisory group at the federal level that opines on the application of new accreditation agencies. These are all places for advocacy. But for faculty, the quickest way may be to convince their campus leadership to slow roll the school becoming a client of the new group, giving time for the other avenues to work.

JW: What in your view is the best argument to make to that campus leadership? How do we convince them that such a move may break things that we want to preserve?

MB: I would make my case to campus leadership on self-interest. Presidents want to shape their institutions. This actually would take power away from them and move it up the ladder. And if they want to preserve their campus autonomy, if they want the politics to stop at the gate so they can serve all students better, this instead would flood their institution with politics.

—

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education, by Dr. Karma R. Chavez

 Friends,

I'll provide updates on the 89th Texas Legislative Session soon that just ended here in Texas, but don't let your day go by without reading Dr. Karma Chavez' excellent AAUP Blog on the importance of faculty governance to democracy. This should be germane to higher education institutions everywhere.

-Angela Valenzuela

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education

Attacks on shared governance are attacks on academic freedom.

By Karma R. Chávez | Spring 2025 | AAUP Blog

In February 2022, amid the growing onslaught of attacks in both K–12 and higher education against teaching about race and racism in US history, the University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council passed a resolution defending academic freedom and, in particular, affirming the right of UT faculty to teach critical race theory, or “CRT,” as it has become known. In no time, Texas’s far-right Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick issued a public statement decrying “looney Marxist professors” and insisting that in the next legislative session he would ban CRT. He explained that this is why the legislature and right-wing donors had been pushing to create the “Liberty Institute” at UT, a proposed right-wing think tank designed to subvert ordinary faculty hiring processes and combat the gender and race ideology that supposedly dominates Texas’s universities.

Implicit in Patrick’s threat was a view that faculty should not be able to govern their own workplaces, and particularly the curriculum. Although in 2022 Patrick had not fleshed out a critique of the faculty’s role in institutional governance, that role, like “CRT” and “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), would quickly be in his crosshairs. Before the 2025 Texas legislative session, which has now begun, Patrick already made it clear that faculty should have no role in governing Texas universities. In April 2024, in his “interim charges” on higher education for the upcoming session, Patrick singled out “faculty senates” as the first of his seven priorities. He charged the Texas Senate to “review and analyze the structures and governance in higher education, focusing on the role of ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, in representing faculty interests to higher education institution administrations” and to “make recommendations to establish guidelines for the role and representation of faculty by ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, at higher education institutions in Texas.”

Although Patrick’s ire was catalyzed by the faculty council’s 2022 resolution, his views in April 2024 were given shape by none other than Christopher Rufo, the architect of both “CRT” and “DEI” bans nationwide. In May 2023, Rufo argued on his Substack blog that rather than upholding the principles of “academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional autonomy,” the university should be governed “according to the principles and priorities of voters, who elect legislators to govern state institutions in the interest of the common good.” In providing a limited summary of a debate he had with Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington, Rufo explained that universities are not “a free marketplace of ideas” but instead represent “a state-run monopoly on education institutions” that should serve “the public good.”

Rufo’s consistent deployment of his claimed investment in the “common” or “public” good is a well-worn tactic to enshrine conservative ideology in law in the name of supposedly benign “common sense.” In my last book, The Borders of AIDS, I detail the persuasiveness of such “commonsense” appeals through an in-depth analysis of a 1987 legislative debate in which Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina advocated for a ban on all HIV-positive immigrants—this despite the fact that virtually no public health entity agreed that a ban would lead to better health outcomes in the United States. In my book, I show how Helms located his brand in a “national commonsense”: It was a matter of common sense, he claimed, that the course of action he advocated would be best for the nation. In the end, despite all the scientific and medical evidence to the contrary, Helms won the debate, and the US Senate passed a devastating ban on HIV-positive immigrants, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law and which remained in place until 2009. The case is instructive in showing how commonsense appeals are so persuasive because they are so hard to refute. Although these appeals typically lack evidence, they call into question the value of expertise, and in the absence of expertise or specifics, they appear to many as if they are self-evidently correct.

Similarly, Rufo’s appeals to the “common” or “public” good are persuasive because they assert as fact that, as publicly funded institutions, colleges and universities should be accountable to the taxpayer. I agree with this claim, though not with his understanding of what it means. My colleagues and I have been given a tremendous responsibility in educating our state’s students. I take that responsibility very seriously, and each time I step into the classroom or hold a mentoring meeting I strive to teach my students the absolute best that my fields of study have to offer. I attend to my students’ work with care, and my North Star is ensuring that their critical thinking, their analytical skills, their understanding of course materials, and their writing are the best that they can be. This is what I was trained to do, and it is what I’ve done every day of my professional life.

In February 2022, when my colleagues at UT passed the resolution affirming the right to academic freedom in teaching, they were expressing the seriousness with which they understood their responsibilities as faculty members. Our job is not to teach and carry out research on subjects that happen to be popular among the majority in our respective legislatures or with the person living in our governor’s mansion. Our job is to teach what we know to be true, and to conduct research without political influence, so that we may continue to refine our knowledge.

Faculty senates and councils provide an expert and informed infrastructure to ensure that we can provide the finest education based on the best and most recent knowledge available. Faculty senates are not apolitical entities. It is through faculty senates that fields like my own—ethnic and gender studies—have had to make the case that our knowledge is worthy of being integral to a university education. And to be clear, those fields have not earned their place without struggle. In my experience, faculty senates, which remain dominated by white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian faculty, continue to approach work of the kind I do with great suspicion. In fields like mine, faculty governance bodies are not always friends; more often they are the first obstacle we must overcome in proving our scholarly worth to our institutions.

Nevertheless, if I am to remain employed by a public university, I must place some level of faith in the importance of having our curriculum assessed by these entities. I do so because I recognize that, while we may differ on the specifics of research and teaching, we all share the values of faculty governance, academic freedom, and independent expertise.

I consider the assault on faculty governance one of the five pillars of the current far-right attack on higher education, along with the assaults on DEI, academic freedom, tenure, and student protest. It remains to be seen if the Texas legislature will be successful in dismantling faculty governance at our state’s public universities. Texas has already banned DEI work, severely limited the meaning of tenure, and cracked down in incredible ways on student protest. How will it curtail academic freedom and shared governance in the 2025 session?

Our current circumstances in Texas bring to mind events from a decade ago in Wisconsin, when I was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2015, the Republican governor, Scott Walker, worked with the Republican legislature to remove from state law protections for tenure and shared faculty and student governance and further concentrate decision-making power in the hands of the board of regents. Walker and his allies were successful in this effort. I remember attending the first faculty senate meeting after the conservative board of regents adopted policies in spring 2016 that replaced the faculty’s shared role in institutional decision-making with a merely advisory role. Prior to this time, these meetings were raucous affairs, because the UW–Madison chancellor at the time, the late Rebecca Blank, couldn’t make any decisions without the agreement of the faculty. The faculty knew this, and we entered each of those meetings knowing our power. The debates were intense, and they required long deliberations to come to consensus. That spring, with the new law in place, Blank walked in with what seemed to me a new air of confidence. As faculty challenged her in their usual assertive way, Blank stood at the podium, pen in hand, jotting notes on a piece of paper. And after each faculty member spoke, she said something to the effect of, “I’ll take that under advisement.”

I do not mean to suggest that administrators like Blank shouldn’t have an important role in determining university policy. They should. There is usually a good reason why they’ve risen through the ranks. But faculty know the curriculum better than any administrator or regent ever could. It is for that reason that 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, holds that the faculty “has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” Without real faculty governance, there can be no academic freedom.

In Texas, we will fight for faculty governance with every resource we have available. But it is important to note that this fight is not limited to red states in the South. As the attacks on DEI have already made clear, no matter where you are, you must be willing to fight for the principles that are now under threat. If you don’t, the consequence could be not just that you might not have a job, but that the very tender bonds of this democracy—if you can even still call our country a democracy—will be shredded beyond repair. 

Karma R. Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves on the executive committee of the AAUP chapter. Her email address is karmachavez@gmail.com.