Ever since the University of South Carolina joined a project to create a new college accreditation body, faculty have voiced their concerns about the impact the project might have on academic freedom.
Accreditors evaluate colleges and universities using a set of standards and something called evidentiary guidelines, which help evaluators know how to measure an institution’s compliance with the accreditor’s rules. Work on creating the Commission for Public Higher Education, or CPHE, began last summer. The new accrediting agency aims to make the process of reaccreditation more efficient and better tailored toward large public universities, according to its website.
When CPHE released its draft standards for review, a lack of clarity was the primary concern from faculty. The accreditor has released its evidentiary guidelines for public comment, shedding more light on what CPHE’s standards mean in practice.
Defining “intellectual diversity”
USC history professor Carol Harrison previously told The Daily Gamecock that a CPHE standard mandating universities to support intellectual diversity was worryingly vague. Harrison is also the president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.
“When I stop and think about it, I don’t really know what it means,” Harrison said in January. “I don’t know what they’re going to be measuring. Do they want to know who I voted for president last time around?”
That won’t be the case, according to the evidentiary guidelines.
“At issue are not the personal politics of individual faculty, other teaching staff, or those who coordinate co-curricular matters,” the guidelines read. “Rather, what is important are the ideas that emerge in the academic and co-curricular life of students and faculty.”
But seeing the evidentiary guidelines has not rid Harrison of her concerns, she said. The exact definition of intellectual diversity is still unclear to her, she added.
The standard requires universities to send CPHE their policies on student organizations and their access to institutional funding, inviting speakers and other forms of expression. It defines intellectual diversity as “a cultural and pedagogical state that furthers pursuit of truth by welcoming a spectrum of reasonable ideas into consideration, civil debate, and study.”
Actions from other CPHE founders concern professors’ association
Harrison’s biggest issue is with what the other universities working on the accreditation body are doing, she said. Several recent stories from CPHE’s founding institutions are a concern for the future of academic freedom, Harrison said.
Texas A&M made a philosophy professor remove certain passages from Plato that dealt with gender roles and identity, Inside Higher Ed reported last month. The administration’s request came during a system-wide audit of course syllabi.
The University of North Carolina recently created a policy that allows the administration to record classes without the instructor’s knowledge or permission in some circumstances, according to The Daily Tar Heel.
In Florida, the state spearheading CPHE, the state university system’s leadership approved a shortened version of an introductory sociology textbook, removing references to systemic inequalities.
“We have to assume that all of those things comport with the CPHE idea of academic freedom, because those are our partners,” Harrison said.
CPHE’s standards include a mandate to protect academic freedom, and the new guidelines point towards a 1940 statement from the AAUP. Harrison is happy to see that standard, but she worries that the accreditor is just paying lip service to the concept, she said.
Faculty brought up similar concerns about the behaviour of other founding institutions during an assembly with USC Board Of Trustees Chair Thad Westbrook last year.
“I can certainly understand your concern, but those are things that are not happening in South Carolina,” Westbrook told a professor at the Sept. 3 meeting.
Harrison agrees that USC has not replicated these incidents, but the influence of the other institutions on CPHE could be an issue, she said.
“University of South Carolina faculty have been very lucky,” Harrison said. “That’s not been the same across the state, and they are working with a straight-up rogues’ gallery of academic freedom violators."