By Art Padilla

When Vermont Connecticut Royster, the two-time Pulitzer winner to whom President Reagan awarded the Medal of Freedom, retired to North Carolina, I jumped at any opportunity to see him. 

Vermont Royster served for 13 years as the renowned executive editor of the Wall Street Journal and afterwards as Kenan Professor in journalism and public affairs at UNC. The Carolina alumnus was one of the most influential columnists of the 20th century. 

During one of our visits, in his typically insightful manner, Mr. Royster expressed annoyance with an accrediting agency, the NC Department of Public Instruction, which required teachers to take classes on how to teach. 

“I can teach 18-year-olds at Carolina about journalism, but I can’t go across town to Chapel Hill High and teach 17-year-olds the same thing,” he told me ruefully.

Accrediting agencies

Discussions about university accreditation are normally met with monumental yawns. Yet several southern states, including North Carolina, are in the process of creating an alternative regional accrediting agency for their public universities. Why is this happening? 

Two emotions stand out: control and arrogance. In North Carolina’s case, the regional accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), threatened the accreditation of the university at Chapel Hill if the UNC trustees created a school of civic leadership, which the university now has done with no accreditation consequence. In Florida, the same accrediting agency questioned the candidacy of a Florida university board member for the Florida State University presidency.

There’s plenty of wrong here.

First, a far richer conversation about conservatism at Carolina would have ensued if the faculty at Chapel Hill had been meaningfully included. Second, in the Florida situation, it always smells bad when trustees try for jobs at their universities. Third, empty threats from an obscure accrediting group aren’t helpful, the same accreditor that ultimately punted during the “fake classes” controversy at Carolina.

More importantly, this is another squabble that should have never reached the desks of state governors or agendas of boards of trustees. It should have been headed off by politically attuned administrators.

Instead, it’s the university’s independence and freedom that suffer due to yet another failure to act. 

Tenuous marriages

Aside from innumerable questions about any new accreditor—the needless expense, the duplication, its independence and credence—there’s another challenge.

There are many types of accrediting bodies. Some accreditors deal exclusively with specific professions or disciplines, like state departments of public instruction, nursing boards, bar associations, and dental boards. Others are the university-wide accrediting entities, like SACSCOC, which accredits universities across the south, that some politicians find objectionable and wish to replace.

Proposals to create new regional accreditors are silent about the profession-based ones. These are more relevant to universities and their students. While North Carolina and other states could in theory supplant the regional SACSCOC, they will find it more difficult to replace disciplinary accreditors, whose endorsement is prerequisite for entrance to the professions. A nursing student who graduates from an unaccredited program, for example, cannot sit for the registered nurse (NCLEX-RN) exam.  

The standards and principles for university programs accreditable by profession-based accreditors (e.g., ACEN in nursing, ABET in engineering, CSWE in social work, or LCME in medicine) are determined in harmony with their professional associations. Legislators and trustees may outlaw DEI at universities, but profession-based accreditors are relatively impervious to such political trends. 

It would be both challenging and educationally irresponsible to dissolve relationships with the numerous profession-based accreditation agencies.

Standards and rubrics

The consequences of not being accredited are draconian, including ineligibility for state licensure or federal financial aid, as well as great difficulty in transferring course credits to accredited institutions. On the other hand, exceptionally few universities are ever unaccredited. Regional accreditation is a (costly) badge of honor for less distinguished institutions. For major universities, it’s seen as a ponderous fire drill or as a dragooning chore that academic departments manipulate to extract resources from deans and provosts.

As bureaucracies are wont to do, regional accrediting agencies tend to grow in staffing and self-importance. They have gone from ensuring that minimal standards are met—that professors have adequate preparation, that courses cover essential topics—to prescribing what is taught, how it’s taught, and, more recently, what trustees shouldn’t do. The instruction manual for the voluminous self-studies institutions must prepare prior to regional accreditation visits is over 200 pages long. 

Be careful what you wish for

The NCAA is higher education’s best known and most vilified accreditor. Its manual of regulations, standards, and principles is 443 pages, down from nearly 1,000 pages not long ago. 

However, the Power Five athletic conferences have now in essence replaced the NCAA. As in the situation of replacing regional accreditors, control and arrogance are also present here. Now ponder where college sports are today.

Will the UNC system expand its administrative bloat, waste more tax dollars, and pursue the expensively duplicative process of replacing SACSCOC? Or should it more wisely encourage existing accreditors to emphasize educationally relevant standards and nothing else?

As they say in Aesop’s Fables, be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.

Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.