How Accreditation Became a Shield for Campus Ideology

For years, universities have embraced accreditation standards that echo their own ideological commitments, especially around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). These standards haven’t felt like external requirements so much as mutual reinforcement—accreditors writing expectations that colleges already agree with and colleges pointing back to those expectations whenever they want to justify a decision. Because of this, it is no surprise that universities are now pushing back against the Trump administration’s effort to end illegal university-accreditation demands for DEI. 

Last month, Department of Education undersecretary Nicholas Kent sent letters to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE), warning both that the DEI requirements built into their current accreditation standards are in conflict with federal law. CAPTE’s accreditation standards, for example, openly demand that its accredited programs promote “justice, equity, diversity, inclusivity, belonging, and anti-racism.” Though CAPTE had “place[d] a stay” on the offending requirements at the start of the second Trump administration, the message to universities remains intact—and institutions like it that way.

For their part, Middle States officials pushed back against Kent’s letter, insisting that, although it had left its DEI requirements in place, it had paused their enforcement. But the Department of Education’s point is simple: If your standards tell institutions to “promote diversity,” you are pressuring them to treat people differently based on race. That is exactly what civil-rights law forbids. Universities have grown comfortable pointing to accreditors when they want to justify DEI-driven initiatives.

The larger pattern is hard to miss. Universities have grown comfortable pointing to accreditors when they want to justify DEI-driven initiatives or other campus ideologies. And accreditors have been equally comfortable embedding those expectations into their frameworks. It’s a mutually reinforcing loop: Accreditors write the language, universities embrace it, and both sides can claim they’re simply following the other’s lead.

The Kent letter exposes something that universities rarely admit: Accreditors have been encouraging race-conscious approaches that stretch far beyond what civil-rights law allows, and colleges have been happy to treat those expectations as both inevitable and desirable. Their objections today sound less like a defense of academic quality and more like a defense of a shared worldview that has quietly shaped campus life for years.

Universities have learned that accreditors make excellent scapegoats in areas far beyond DEI. This is especially true for wavering religious colleges and universities. When university leaders want to secularize the mission of a religious college, or sideline a founding religious community, they simply claim that their hands are tied by accreditation standards. That’s exactly what happened at Saint Anselm College in 2020, when the founding order of the university, the Benedictine Monks, filed a lawsuit to prevent the college’s board of trustees from changing the bylaws without the consent of the monks. After more than a century of Benedictine governance, the board suddenly insisted that the university’s accrediting body, the New England Commission on Higher Education (NECHE) “required” them to dilute the monks’ authority. The monks knew what was really happening and filed the lawsuit to make it clear that the proposed bylaw changes would strip them of any meaningful role in safeguarding the college’s Catholic and Benedictine identity. Yet the college’s leadership continued to point to NECHE as the reason they were forced to remove the monks from the board.

Blaming accreditors has been a common strategy—one implemented in the past by dozens of religious colleges and universities hoping to broaden their appeal to potential students and donors by secularizing their boards and expanding their missions. Many of these colleges and universities removed religious leaders from their boards, revised their mission statements, and even changed their names to appeal to a less religious audience. For example, Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart dropped the Catholic signifier “Sacred Heart” on December 7, 1966, to hide its Catholic identity, becoming, simply, Manhattanville College. 

Accreditors should be asking whether colleges are living up to their stated missions. Accreditors should be asking whether colleges are living up to their stated missions—whether the educations they promise on paper match the cultures and curricula students encounter on campus. But, in practice, most accreditors rarely press that question. The alignment between mission and reality is often treated as a formality, not a standard.

Every so often, an accreditor breaks the pattern and says the quiet part out loud. That’s what happened when the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) reviewed St. Mary’s College of California. Instead of rubber-stamping the school’s self-description of its mission and Catholic identity, the accrediting team pointed out the obvious: The college’s Catholic tradition was not “truly guiding” the institution. In his research on Catholic campuses, the late Rev. James Burtchaell uncovered the WASC report, which suggested that St. Mary’s may have been misleading potential students and their families about its Catholic identity. Publishing the report in his magisterial book The Dying of the Light, Burtchaell reported that the WASC team observed that “the liberal arts, Catholic, and Lasallian traditions which are used to define the character of St. Mary’s College are appropriate and laudatory and consistent with WASC standards. However, we found little evidence that these traditions are truly guiding the institution.”

The Saint Anselm episode is a reminder of how easily accreditation can be weaponized. This was a rare moment in which an accreditor called attention to the gap between a university’s stated identity and the education it actually provides for students. But colleges rarely cite such moments, and there is no evidence that St. Mary’s took the criticism seriously by changing its culture or curriculum to strengthen its Catholic identity. The “accreditor made us do it” narrative seems to surface only when leaders want cover for decisions that distance the institution from its founding purpose, its original mission, or a politically disfavored ideology. The Saint Anselm episode is a reminder of how easily accreditation can be weaponized—not by accreditors but by institutions eager to claim that controversial decisions are simply “required.” It is a pattern that shows up again and again whenever a college wants to move away from the mission that once defined it.

The longstanding alliance between universities and accreditors is being openly challenged. The clash now unfolding between the Trump administration and the accreditors is not simply a legal dispute over civil-rights law—it is a rare moment when the longstanding alliance between universities and accreditors is being openly challenged. For years, DEI-infused accreditation standards have allowed both sides to reinforce the same ideological commitments while insisting that they are merely following external requirements. Middle States and CAPTE may claim they have “paused” their DEI mandates, but the language remains embedded in their standards because institutions want it there. The administration’s insistence that accreditors actually comply with federal law disrupts this comfortable arrangement. It forces universities and accreditors to confront the fact that their shared DEI framework is not neutral and not legally defensible when it pressures institutions to treat people differently on the basis of race.

By insisting that accreditors remove standards that conflict with federal law, the Department of Education has reminded both accreditors and universities that mission, identity, and legality cannot be overridden by a set of ideological expectations. If nothing else, this moment has brought to light the quiet collusion that has shaped accreditation for years. It has opened the door to a long-overdue reexamination of what accreditation is supposed to safeguard in the first place. This moment may be the first real test of whether accreditation protects institutional integrity or merely protects the assumptions and ideologies that universities have quietly woven into the fabric of their institutional identities.

Anne Hendershott is professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.