A few of the policies in the order warrant special comment.
Ending Illegal Race Preferences. In what could end up being its most consequential provision, the order zeroes in on accreditors that encourage institutions to engage in race-preferential admissions that violate the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (2023).
If I didn’t know better, I might wonder what all the fuss was about. Surely, accreditors know that they should not encourage colleges and universities to violate the law. They can’t possibly be doing that, can they? But, alas, some are. It’s a problem with a long history.
Race-preferential admissions policies have always been in conflict with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But when accreditors began pressuring schools to engage in them, the Supreme Court had not yet mustered the courage to issue a prohibition. The Court’s fractured decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke(1978) left colleges and universities enough wiggle room to discriminate by race if they wished. But many accreditors went further. They sought to make such discrimination mandatory.
The first case to come to public attention involved Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and its threat to de-accredit Baruch College, a constituent college of the City University of New York. In 1990, when the threat was issued, there was nothing wrong with Baruch’s library or its student-faculty ratio. Its science labs were tidy and well-equipped, its finances were in order, and its faculty, which included a Nobel laureate in economics, was excellent. Instead, Middle States faulted the school for an alleged failure to hire enough minority faculty members and to try hard enough to retain a racially diverse student body. Fortunately for Baruch, then-Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander came to its rescue by administering Middle States some of its own medicine—deferring the renewal of federal recognition of its status as an accreditor.
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Definitions of accreditors.
