Op-Ed: No Credit

This article originally appeared in American Mind on March 14, 2023

When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Board of Trustees passed a unanimous resolution calling on campus leaders to “accelerate” the “development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership” in late January, Belle Wheelan, president of one of the largest higher education accreditors in the country, immediately moved to kill the initiative.

Though the actions of accreditors go largely unnoticed by the public, their sway over higher education is immense, because they are the de facto gatekeepers to federal higher education funding. This is not the first time the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC or SACS) has used its influence to undermine a governing board or a state’s vision for its public campuses. But SACS’s opposition to a much-needed initiative to improve intellectual diversity at UNC is surely among the most egregious.

A detail that would later emerge—that President Wheelan threatened the accreditation of a premier state university without even reading the board resolution at issue—indicates that her goal was to bully the university into abandoning its civics initiative. The lesson to draw from the UNC story is that higher education accreditation is in desperate need of comprehensive reform. Absent change, every innovative university president is likely to run into a buzzsaw of capricious political meddling and entrenched resistance to higher education reform at the hands of unaccountable and highly ideological accreditation bureaucrats.

Read full op-ed in American Mind