Trump's attack on Harvard underscores existential risk of weaponizing college accreditation

Boston Globe

10-07-2025

As a higher education researcher and a former Harvard College dean who has experienced and contributed to the accreditation process, I believe this is an existential threat to an essential mechanism that has shaped the character of American higher education: pluralistic, decentralized, and, until recently, largely insulated from direct political control.
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Since our country's founding, America's colleges and universities have been defined by institutional autonomy. This is the result of a social compact by which, in return for a commitment to serving society, institutions have been overseen by a decentralized self-regulation system that has allowed variety to flourish, innovation to emerge, and legitimacy to be earned — through professional norms, not external mandates.
Today, that social compact is fraying. Accreditation, once an esoteric, peer-driven mechanism for ensuring institutional integrity, has become another proxy battlefield in the nation's higher education wars.
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Accreditation was never intended to be a lever of state power, and it wasn't meant to evaluate schools on narrow economic criteria such as the immediate starting salaries of its graduates. Instead, it grew from the American tradition of voluntary civic self-organization in service to the public good. Educational institutions collaborated to define, evaluate, and improve themselves without surrendering their independence to centralized authority. The accreditation system has sought not to impose uniformity from above but to cultivate shared standards from within, thereby earning public confidence.
Accreditation emerged in the late 19th century in response to a fragmented educational landscape. Regional associations emerged to address inconsistent standards and expectations among high schools and colleges. Early efforts addressed basic but vital questions: What is a college? Who is qualified to teach? Accreditation became a civic mechanism for quality assurance, while avoiding direct government control over higher education's mission and governance.
Including this principle of mission-based evaluation allowed American educational pluralism to thrive. Elite research universities, faith-based schools, small liberal arts colleges, technical institutes, and teaching colleges could all be recognized without being made uniform. Accreditation became a steward of institutional diversity, safeguarding the public interest while honoring difference.
After World War II, this civic covenant shifted dramatically. The GI Bill democratized higher education by opening college doors to millions of veterans. But with expansion came opportunism. Unscrupulous schools and for-profit diploma mills sprang up to tap federal funds, prompting widespread concern over fraud and substandard instruction.
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Some policy makers initially proposed the federal government take over accreditation. However, the example of authoritarian regimes in Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union, where centralized ministries of education decimated academic freedom and politicized scholarship, made many Americans deeply wary of federal government intervention. Instead, Congress opted for a characteristically American solution: In 1952, it required the commissioner of education to identify 'nationally recognized accrediting agencies' that could serve as gatekeepers of federal funds. What had begun as a voluntary, peer-led process now carried the weight — and the risks — of official regulatory authority.
So colleges, once supported by tuition and private donors (which presented their own problems of access and influence), became more financially dependent on federal dollars and subjected to federal regulation, making them increasingly susceptible to political interference.
Accreditation thus became a double-edged sword. It conferred legitimacy and enabled access to public resources, but it also pulled accrediting agencies into a quasi-regulatory role they were never designed to fill.
Today, accreditation is under threat from forces betraying its founding principles. Government officials have begun to wield accreditation as a political weapon, threatening schools' status over disputes related to diversity, discrimination, hiring decisions, curriculum content, or degree programs deemed to have 'low economic value.' Commercial lobbying for relaxed or no meaningful standards threatens to reduce accreditation to a market tool. Such interventions risk transforming peer-based educational evaluation into a mechanism for ideological or financial compliance. Rather than cultivating trust and academic integrity, these approaches may chill institutional missions, restrict curricular freedom, and undermine pluralism under the guise of accountability.
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These interventions are not technical tweaks. They represent a growing effort to consolidate control over higher education in the hands of political actors or subordinate the sector to market forces, weakening the professional norms and pluralism that have long been the foundation of America's higher education system.
Together, these political and commercial threats pose systemic risk. If accreditors are pressured to serve partisan or profit-driven agendas, the pluralism that distinguishes American higher education will collapse. Peer review will degrade into checklist compliance or ideologically driven oversight. Politicizing accreditation corrodes trust, undermines expertise, and imperils democratic norms.
Accreditation must evolve. But it should do so deliberately, not disruptively. Its strength lies in peer review: iterative, imperfect, and slow by design. In an age of hot takes, such deliberation may seem outdated. But it is how, since the dawn of the scientific revolution, knowledge safeguards itself. Change must come from within, rooted in professional responsibility and review, not be imposed by political agendas or profit motives.
America must defend what keeps higher education free. If we break it, we risk universities turning into instruments of politics or profit.
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