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Vilda Westh Blanc
City Journal
Excerpt: Higher education accreditation is in crisis. Accreditation was once an important signal, giving parents and students useful information about the value of a college degree. Now it has been reduced to a political weapon wielded against those who deviate from progressive orthodoxy.
This year, six public university flagships—Texas A&M and the Universities of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—joined forces to create the Commission for Public Higher Education. CPHE focuses on a different model of accreditation. By focusing on real student achievement, job readiness, and research productivity, these universities aim to make accreditation a tool for competitive enhancement, not a bureaucratic straitjacket.
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I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
