Why Are They Coming After Our Colleges?
Legislators are trying to reshape higher education
Two primary reasons I loved my college and university experiences
While not the only source for broadening and expanding intellectual and cultural learning and awareness, college and university experiences provide amazing opportunities for such expansion.
Although I spent six years in the military traveling the world before receiving my first college degree, my time living, studying, and learning on college and university campuses provided me with some of my greatest intellectual and cultural learning experiences.
My most significant college learning experiences came from two sources:
- Meeting and engaging students, faculty, and staff differing by age, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, faith, ideology, and cultural background.
- Being exposed to such differences through the curriculum offered at the colleges and universities I attended.
Unfortunately, these opportunities for diverse learning are under threat.
Do we really want to promote “uniformity, inequity, and exclusion”?
Quite a bit of attention has been given to the practice of banning books in schools and libraries. There is, however, an even more insidious (and relatively unknown) attempt being made by some legislators to reshape the landscape of colleges and universities.
Florida governor and Republican presidential nominee Ron Desantis is well known for his book-banning efforts and reforms of public education in Florida. Most of his efforts have focused on primary and secondary school education. At his signing of the Parental Rights in Education bill, DeSantis declared,
We will make sure parents can send their kids to school to get an education not an indoctrination.
Although he bemoans the dangers of “indoctrination,” virtually all of DeSantis’s education policies, especially his book-banning policies, promote indoctrination.
In simple terms, indoctrination consists of teaching someone to fully accept a particular group’s ideas, opinions, and beliefs and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.
As I explain in another article, book bans are about preventing exposure to diverse views. They’re about control. They’re about indoctrination.
While DeSantis has a long history of overhauling primary and secondary education in Florida, he has also been hard at work attempting to reshape higher education.
Announcing his 2024 presidential bid, Gov. DeSantis criticized higher education accrediting agencies calling them “cartels” that are driving the proliferation of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies on college campuses.
While diversity on American college and university campuses (especially among faculty) is far from perfect, diversity, equity, and inclusion provided some of the most meaningful, valuable, and transformative learning experiences for me while in college.
The alternative to promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is promoting “uniformity, inequity, and exclusion.” Are we honestly saying we’d rather live in a world where colleges and universities promote uniformity, inequity, and exclusion? Are these the values and principles we want to proliferate?
Why are diversity, equity, and inclusion dangerous values?
DeSantis asserted that if he were elected president, the U.S. Department of Education would create “alternative accreditation regimes, where instead of saying, ‘You will only get accredited if you do DEI,’ you’ll have an accreditor that will say, ‘We will not accredit you if you do DEI.’”
While DeSantis is acknowledging he will create an accreditation process that denies accreditation to schools promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, Ralph A. Wolff, a former president of an accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, states that no college or university has ever “lost accreditation for failing to meet a standard under DEI.”
DeSantis’s rhetoric does nothing more than promote fear of and reveal his own ideological disdain for diversity, equity, and inclusion. We should, however, fear and disdain uniformity, inequity, and exclusion because history has proven that they lead to far greater harm, violence, and damage to society.
Here’s their plan for reshaping higher education
While the practice of banning books and poems often draws public attention and criticism (and rightly so), this outright attack on DEI is flying under the radar. Because the accreditation process is complex, lengthy, and rather confusing, proposed changes to the process don’t draw the sort of headline attention that banning books draw. Such changes, however, have more significant and longer-lasting ramifications. This is why Desantis is focusing on changing accreditation policies and practices.
In 2022, DeSantis passed a bill requiring the state’s public colleges to change accreditors after each 10-year accreditation cycle. The Florida law effectively forces all of the state’s public colleges, within the next decade, to find a new accreditor.
At the beginning of 2023, DeSantis announced sweeping plans to dismantle major areas of Florida’s higher education system: weakening tenure protections for professors, eliminating majors like gender studies, and prohibiting programming related to DEI.
These changes were to be achieved by two bills in the state legislature, House Bill 999 and the Senate companion SB 266. While the bills faced initial resistance requiring rewording and scrubbing references to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the language was simply replaced with broader language against “programs” that support ideas related to “oppression and privilege,” “systemic racism,” and other related concepts.
Despite the editing of language, the bills still seek to change how professors are hired and get tenure and what is taught on college campuses. The bills also make it clear that their objective is to achieve the Republican aim of removing critical race theory from all higher education curricula.
It not just happening in Florida
Other states are following Florida’s lead. According to an Associated Press analysis, at least a dozen states have introduced more than 30 bills this year that target DEI initiatives at colleges and universities.
In Congress, Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican of Utah, introduced a bill that would prohibit accreditors from making colleges “meet any political litmus tests, such as requiring adherence to DEI standards, as a condition of accreditation.”
Lawmakers in North Carolina are also considering similar measures, most of which are designed to help accelerate the development of a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. The school has long been characterized as lacking faculty input and as a way for conservative legislators to insert their political ideology into the institution’s curriculum.
It should come as no surprise that another Republican presidential nominee is also attacking accreditation. Earlier in May, former President Donald Trump said he would “fire” the existing accrediting agencies and create new ones to reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
Trump’s plan would require colleges to remove administrators overseeing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Continuing with the practice of promoting indoctrination, Trump’s plan would require colleges to ensure their curriculum defends “the American tradition and Western civilization.”
It’s important to point out that during his time in office, Trump’s Education Department under Secretary Betsy DeVos overhauled federal rules governing college accrediting agencies. Fortunately, those changes did not target the curriculum being taught at universities or what types of administrators they hire, as Trump is now proposing.
Higher education must function independently of political control
Republican legislators like DeSantis have made it increasingly clear that they think governing boards of public institutions should answer to no one as long as the members of those boards are selected by Republicans. The ultimate goal of the conservative movement in higher education is to remake college and university cultures to more closely reflect the apparent conservative values of uniformity, inequity, and exclusion.
Accreditors serve as an important check on the political motives of state governments, ensuring the political independence of colleges and universities. As a faculty person at a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa, I am aware there is plenty of room for improvement in the accreditation process.
Accrediting bodies should not be subject to the whims of partisan politics. Accreditors need the ability to act independently of partisan politics whereby ensuring colleges and universities maintain their ability to offer students an educational experience that promotes “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rather than “uniformity, inequity, and exclusion.”
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