Trump orders HE accreditation overhaul to stamp out DEI

Fulfilling a campaign promise to rein in “radical left accreditors” that have allowed colleges to be “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week that will restructure the nation’s system of college and university accreditation, a move professors say is another means to control higher education and will open the door to corruption.

As seen in a posting from C-Span, while handing the bound order to Trump in the Oval Office, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said: “University accreditation is currently a process controlled by a number of third-party organisations by statute, by law.

“Many of the third-party accreditors relied on woke ideology to accredit universities instead of accrediting based on merit and performance. This executive order reflects changes to the university accreditation process and also applies to law schools and other graduate programmes.”

‘Another way to control higher education’

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), accused the president of using changes to accreditation as another means to take over American higher education.

“Trump’s goal is to manipulate accreditors in order to force colleges and universities to do his bidding and punish them when they resist. He is weaponising the accreditation process to gain the leverage he seeks.

“This order is yet another example of the Trump administration’s attempt to control American higher education. The stated goal of increasing ‘intellectual diversity’ is code for a partisan agenda that will muzzle faculty who do not espouse Trump’s ideological agenda. This order will upend protections for students and degrade their experience on campus,” said Wolfson.

Extreme changes

The executive order’s rather bland name, “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education”, hides the extreme changes that it mandates in the system of arms-length regional accreditors dating back to 1952.

The system was incorporated into the Higher Education Act of 1965, which authorised US$2.6 billion over three years in federal financial aid support for students attending colleges and universities; federal financial aid now totals US$120 billion and includes Pell Grants made to the nation’s poorest students.

The order authorised Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to monitor, suspend or terminate accreditors who “violate Federal law, including by requiring institutions seeking accreditation to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) initiatives”.

Earlier executive orders (some of which have been challenged in court) ordered the dismantling of DEI initiatives across the federal government in agencies it funds, along with colleges and universities that accept federal funds.

In response to an email from University World News asking for an explanation as to how the government can force accrediting agencies to abandon diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or be punished by the government for requiring them as part of the accreditation process, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE, which covers seven states from New York to Washington DC) answered, first, by noting its relationship to the Department of Education’s regulatory regime and, second, by quoting the part of the order that states that the Secretary of Education shall discipline accreditors who continue to require DEI initiatives as part of accreditation.

The MSCHE then added: “We have standards that are set by statute or regulation. However, as a member organisation, our commission has set standards beyond those minimal government requirements that reflect the unique values and missions of our institutions.”

Intellectual diversity

McMahon has also been ordered to prevent accreditors from requiring colleges and universities from using “race, ethnicity or sex” in designing “programme-level” efforts to improve student outcomes. The executive order requires the Department of Education to “recognise new accreditors to increase competition and accountability”.

The executive order says that “in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning”, henceforth “accreditation requires that institutions support and appropriately prioritise intellectual diversity amongst faculty”.

Although the order does not specify how this requirement should be implemented, the focus on intellectual diversity echoes the agenda being set in Florida and Indiana, which have both put in place mandatory surveys of professors’ and students’ political positions.

It is noteworthy also that increasing “intellectual diversity” has figured prominently in the Trump administration’s demands of both Harvard and Columbia universities.

MSCHE responded to the executive order’s statement about “intellectual diversity” by referring to its “Standards for Accreditation and Requirements for Affiliation”, which states, in part, that a “c candidate [for accreditation] or accredited institution possesses and demonstrates the following attributes or activities: 1. a commitment to academic freedom, intellectual freedom, freedom of expression, and respect for intellectual property rights; 2. a climate that fosters respect among students, faculty, staff, and administration from a range of diverse backgrounds, ideas, and perspectives.”

Within hours of the executive order being signed, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), the national organisation that represents more than 60 such organisations, issued a statement striking back at the administration’s claim that “accreditors – the gatekeepers that decide which colleges and universities can access over US$100 billion in annual federal student loans and Pell Grants – have routinely approved low-quality institutions, ultimately failing students, families and American taxpayers”.

In a press release, CHEA said: “The standards of accrediting organisations require institutions [that is, colleges] to provide evidential data that contributes to the success of all students, that is, course completion, graduate rates, faculty qualifications, student learning experiences, innovative practices [and] application of appropriate resources.”

To the charge that the national six-year undergraduate rate of just 60% (in 2020) shows that the accreditors have “failed to ensure quality”, CHEA replied: “When there is a shortfall in outcomes [by colleges], accreditors work with institutions to establish benchmarks for achievements.”

Protection against scams – like Trump University

The AAUP statement headline – “Trump’s Executive Order on Accreditations Opens the Door for Rampant Corruption and Political Interference in Academic Institutions” – captures a key concern for the association.

An example of the type of corruption the AAUP has in mind is Trump University, established by Trump in 2004, which billed itself as teaching real estate investing and which, despite its name, was not an accredited university.

It closed in 2011 and was the subject of several state investigations as well as a number of lawsuits, including two class action cases that were settled out of court for US$25 million in 2016, a week after Trump was first elected president.

“Accrediting agencies have protected both students and the government from wasting money on scam institutions – like Trump University – that engage in deceit and grift. Trump’s executive order makes both the students and governments more vulnerable to such fraud,” said the AAUP.

The AAUP further argues that the executive order is an “attempt to dictate what is taught, learnt, said and done by college students and their instructors. Threats to remove accreditors [because, for example, they may continue to require DEI activities] from their roles are transparent attempts to consolidate more power in the hands of the Trump Administration in order to stifle teaching and research”.

The order to recognise new accreditors “to increase competition and accountability” combined with the threat to decertify existing agencies will, the AAUP argues, force accreditors to either transform themselves beyond recognition by taking on political dictates and ideological claptrap of the administration or be replaced by new fly-by-night agencies willing to toe the party line.

“This is exactly the kind of partisan interference that the academic accreditation is supposed to guard against,” said the AAUP.

Law and medical school accreditation

While most of the executive order concerns undergraduate higher education, it also contains fiery content that threatens the law and medical school accrediting agencies because of their commitment to requiring law and medical schools to have diverse student bodies and faculties.

In one section, it accuses the American Bar Association’s council of violating the law.

“The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (Council), which is the sole federally recognised accreditor for Juris Doctor programs, has required law schools to ‘demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion’, including by ‘commit[ting] to having a student body [and faculty] that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity’.

“As the Attorney General has concluded and informed the Council, the discriminatory requirement blatantly violates the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v President and Fellows of Harvard College” – the 2023 decision that declared affirmative action unconstitutional.

(Whatever the merits of the administration’s claim about the American Bar Association’s accrediting agency and enrolment, its claim that the decision dealt with the make-up of an institution’s faculty is factually incorrect.)

The paragraph concludes by declaring that while “the Council subsequently suspended its enforcement [of DEI] while it considers proposed revisions, this standard and similar unlawful mandates must be permanently eradicated”.

Though neither Trump nor McMahon has referenced the attorney general, as the executive order does, lawyers are aware that back in late February Pam Bondi wrote to the council saying that its refusal to change its stated commitment to DEI meant “there is just one appropriate course: The Standard must be repealed in its entirety. And there is no reason to wait; the Council should repeal the Standard immediately”.

Bondi’s letter concludes with a threat. “The Council’s status as the sole accrediting body of American law schools is a privilege, and mandatory diversity objectives are an abuse of that privilege, which is subject to revocation.

“Even if it does not come to that, it is unclear how state bars can lawfully continue to require prospective lawyers to attend ABA [American Bar Association]-accredited law schools if the Council continues to abuse its privilege in this way. The Department of Justice stands ready to take every action necessary to prevent further abuse.”

According to Reuters, Trump said he was directing McMahon “to assess whether to suspend or terminate the ABA as the government’s official law school accreditor”.

The paragraph dealing with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), which accredits Doctor of Medicine programmes, requires that these programmes engage “in ongoing, systematic, and focused recruitment and retention activities to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students”.

While the executive order does not explicitly threaten to extinguish either the LCME’s role as the nation’s medical programmes, the implication is clear – both from the fact that this paragraph follows the one on the ABA council and from the statement: “The standards for training tomorrow’s doctors should focus solely on providing the highest quality care and certainly not on requiring unlawful discrimination.”

Over the past number of years, both medical and law schools have worked to diversify their student bodies and faculties following the recognition that both legal and medical practitioners need not only to have experience dealing with a diversity of peoples but also that members of racialised groups as well as identifiable populations such as women are more apt to seek legal advice or medical care from someone who understands their place in American society.

The problem of objective determinations

A lawyer who works in the field of higher education, who for professional reasons asked to remain nameless, questioned the administration’s claim to be increasing “viewpoint diversity in order to advance academic freedom”.

“It puts the accreditors in a difficult position,” the lawyer told University World News. How are they to know what a professor’s viewpoint is? How can you objectively know that?

“Then you get to the problem of saying: ‘They don't have enough, so we’re going to tell the school they have to have more conservative faculty or more liberal faculty.’

“But that leads you back to ‘What is a viewpoint, one’s ideology?’ A libertarian viewpoint is not a conservative viewpoint. A progressive viewpoint isn’t necessarily a centrist viewpoint.

“So, how does one make an objective determination?”

This article was updated on 4 May 2025