The DEI Mandates That Won’t Go Away

In September, the American Bar Association’s law-school accrediting council formally repealed Standard 206, commonly known as its diversity standard. In its earlier form, the standard required law schools to demonstrate through concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion. The standard had already been suspended and had gone unenforced since 2024. The September 8 vote followed years of debate and came as the council was navigating renewed federal scrutiny of its recognition as the national accreditor for J.D. programs.

The decision drew attention because DEI remains one of higher education’s favorite political battlegrounds. Law schools, however, are only one corner of professional education. Nursing, psychology, medicine, and social work all operate under accreditation standards that address diversity in some form. A closer look shows that “DEI requirements” can describe very different things.

Take nursing. The Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing’s Criterion 4.7 requires curricula to incorporate contemporary concepts including “diversity, equity, inclusion, and/or social determinants of health.” Those concepts appear alongside evidence-based practice, information literacy, collaboration, and professional identity. The standard is situated largely within what nursing students are expected to encounter as part of professional preparation.

If that sounds closer to ordinary professional training than ideological supervision, there is a reason. Nurses treat patients from every imaginable background. Preparing them to understand social determinants of health or communicate across cultural differences has an obvious connection to patient care. 

Psychology takes another approach. The American Psychological Association’s Standards of Accreditation treat “individual and cultural diversity” as one of nine profession-wide competencies for health-service psychologists. In 2025, however, the APA’s Commission on Accreditation temporarily suspended evaluation of several standards tied to diversity in recruitment, admissions, selection, and retention amid changes in the legal and regulatory environment.

The suspension highlights a useful divide. Preparing psychologists to work effectively with people whose experiences or worldviews differ from their own fits comfortably within professional competence. Directing how programs recruit and retain students and faculty reaches further into institutional practice.

Social work leaves considerably less room for ambiguity. The Council on Social Work Education makes “Engage Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Practice” one of nine core competencies in its 2022 accreditation standards. CSWE guidance requires programs to teach and assess that competency, including assessment in field education.

That is a lot of conceptual freight for one professional competency. CSWE also makes clear that programs retain discretion over how they teach it and leaves specific theories, such as Critical Race Theory, to program discretion. That caveat is useful, but the underlying question remains: What exactly constitutes competence in “anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and how does an accreditor measure it consistently across institutions? This is particularly important given that the CSWE has used their influence to promote DEI ideology before.

Medical education offers yet another model. The Liaison Committee on Medical Education’s Element 3.3 requires medical schools to maintain policies and practices, including recruitment and retention efforts, aimed at achieving “mission-appropriate diversity outcomes” among students, faculty, senior administrators, and other members of the academic community. LCME has also explained that schools choose their own diversity categories and that the standard leaves quantitative targets to the institutions.

That flexibility deserves acknowledgement. Even so, Element 3.3 moves accreditation beyond what an individual future physician knows or can do. It reaches into how a medical school recruits, retains, and organizes parts of its academic community. At that point, accreditation is doing more than checking whether graduates are prepared to practice medicine.

In any case, state laws in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, and Iowa now restrict DEI-related activities at public universities, creating potential friction with accreditation standards governing recruitment, training, and institutional policy. The approaches differ: Alabama expressly permits accreditation-related activities, Florida allows exceptions with state approval, and Arkansas prohibits public institutions from complying with DEI-related institutional accreditation requirements.

Professional schools have good reason to prepare graduates for the people and communities they will serve. Physicians need to communicate with patients across cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. Psychologists need to understand how culture and lived experience can shape a client’s needs. Social workers routinely serve communities facing disparities in resources and opportunity. Each of those propositions can be defended on professional grounds alone.

The harder question is what accreditation should require in response, and how those requirements should be measured.

Teaching a future practitioner to communicate effectively with a diverse patient population is one thing. Requiring an institution to pursue particular recruitment practices, organize its curriculum around specified concepts, or demonstrate adherence to a broader ideological commitment is something else. Tossing all of those requirements into the same DEI bucket may be politically convenient, but it obscures more than it clarifies.

Competence should be the test. Accrediting bodies should be able to explain what professional skill a requirement develops, how that skill is measured, and why an accreditation mandate is necessary to produce it. “Diversity” is too important a concept to become a catch-all label that contains heavy ideological baggage and ends the conversation rather than beginning one.

Accreditation standards do more than signal professional preferences; they shape how institutions operate. Schools organize programs, personnel, curricula, and resources around remaining in good standing. When an accreditor shifts from evaluating whether graduates can competently practice a profession to prescribing the institutional commitments through which schools must demonstrate compliance, its role has expanded.

If a requirement is powerful enough to influence whether a program remains accredited, the accreditor should be able to show precisely what professional competency it advances, how that competency is measured, and why the mandate belongs in accreditation. If the case is strong, showing the work should be easy. The fact that it is often not that easy shows that the rot is still alive.

Alejandro J. Ramos is the Founder and Executive Director of the Ramos Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to strengthening youth civic education, media literacy, and democratic engagement.