What's the proper business of college and university accreditors? Should they just concentrate on ensuring educational quality--or should they be telling trustees how to run their schools? Where is the line between ensuring the one and interfering with the other? How do accreditors walk this line--and when do they cross it? These are all vital questions, as accreditation must be in place for a school to receive federal student aid. Without that, most schools would be effectively shut down; they could neither operate nor compete for students. So accreditors have immense power--and they can abuse it with impunity.

ACTA has written about this quite a bit (see its 2007 report on why accreditation does not work, with its revealing examples of accreditors who impose politicized educational criteria on ed programs, social work programs, and law schools, as well as accreditors who micromanage schools into oblivion). And today, ACTA president Anne Neal writes about the recent sanctions imposed by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) on junior colleges. Citing intrusive sanctions imposed by WASC on schools for such idiosyncratic and ambiguous criteria as their planning style and their campus "climate," Neal argues that WASC is meddling in areas of governance where it does not belong:

It's bad enough that accreditors often ignore what they are asked to review, namely educational quality. But it's even worse that they frequently push their own agenda---an agenda that interferes with governance and treads mighty close to regulating the exchange of ideas on campus. The situation with WASC and California schools is a case in point.

Here, it appears the accreditor is picking sides in internal disputes. Under the guise of quality assurance, WASC is demanding that trustees defer to faculty and administrators--the very groups that the review teams represent.

Of course, it might be tolerable if the trustees could tell the accreditors to go away. But under the current regulatory regime, California boards have essentially no choice---regional accreditors such as WASC have carved up the country into little cartels. WASC is the regional gatekeeper for federal funds. If it doesn't accredit UC or the California community colleges, the institutions can't receive federal student-aid dollars. Causing a school to lose federal funding is tantamount to shutting it down.

So the accreditors wield immense power over these institutions---and they are thus able to manipulate what happens on campus in subtle ways. "The interests of the faculty and administrators have become primary to the accreditors and are in direct conflict with engaged, reform-minded trustees," outgoing Hawaii regent Jane Tatibouet---whose university is also subject to WASC accreditation---explained at a recent forum in Washington, D.C. "The accreditors, in my view, are subtly 'blackmailing' the academic institution into obedience or sanctions will be imposed. The threat of a sanction or actual probation is the first tool used to keep a Board under the accreditor's thumb, ultimately preventing the Board from performing its role both as steward and visionary while addressing accountability, financial and cost controls, and academic excellence."

Rather than allowing accreditors and internal campus constituencies to bully boards and undermine their fiduciary work, trustees urgently need to exercise their rightful role. At the same time, policymakers need to hear from trustees calling for an end to a federal system that undermines the very institutional independence that has made American higher education so great.