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Will accreditors stop DeSantis' takeover of higher ed? Nope. His plan is to move. [1]

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Date: 2023-02-24  

I’ve been saying for awhile that DeSantis’ moves against higher education have looked like he really didn’t care what accreditation bodies would say about all of his overtly anti-academic freedom moves. Which is pretty risky … if you care about accreditation. As it currently exists.

What if DeSantis doesn’t care about accreditation? What if DeSantis has already planned for ripping Florida’s colleges and universities out of accrediting bodies and moving them all to organizations that are complaint enough and “anti-woke” enough for him?

That’s exactly what’s been happening.

On January 18th, the presidents of the Florida College System (mostly community colleges) released a startling public letter (PDF) that asserted “that critical race theory is an "ideology" that "mean[s] and accomplish[es] the very opposite" of "diversity in thought"; they also announced policies that seek to restrict and regulate critical race theory's teaching and funding.” To say and do such a thing is a direct attack on academic freedom and faculty control of curricula, which is a nearly unthinkable broadside coming from a institutional group of university administrators. It’s as though the American Medical Association announced that doctors would no longer be allowed to read lab reports and interpret them for their own patients. In other words, what the Florida College System presidents did was beyond bombshell. Something else had to be going on.

In response, the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)—a bit of a canary in the coal mine—made an immediate call for all of the 28 Florida System presidents to resign (PDF). That demand seemed a little bit of a reach when I first heard about it, but the ACLA must have been aware of other devious moves DeSantis was already making:

Florida Shops for New Accreditors (Feb 11, 2023) Education officials in Florida have been meeting with agencies as they seek a new accreditor for state colleges and universities. The Florida Department of Education and the chancellor of the State University System of Florida gathered the leaders of nearly 40 state institutions in Tallahassee Dec. 7 for a closed-door meeting whose purpose remains unclear. Neither the state Department of Education nor the chancellor’s office responded to multiple requests for comment or for a meeting agenda, attendee list and other details. The Florida Board of Governors has provided only vague statements on the meeting

The rest of the Feb 11 Inside Higher Education piece sort of ignores the larger threat of what has been happening … as though it was impossible to believe that DeSantis was actually intending on purging Florida college and universities of any accreditation organization that would threaten his attempt to takeover Florida’s higher education system.

So the title of Laura Clawson’s earlier front page post today “DeSantis bill lays out a right-wing takeover of Florida public colleges and universities” is absolutely spot on. A takeover is exactly what’s been happening. With the bill DeSantis has put forward to totally abandon faculty control of curricula and hiring at Florida colleges and universities, the whole charade is becoming crystal clear; he’s intentionally creating a crisis where he can take Florida’s colleges and universities out of their current accreditation organizations and institute his own alternative system that won’t question his control of faculty and curricula.

That is CLEARLY where we are at. That is CLEARLY what is happening. The current regional accreditation organizations that Florida belongs to will either bend to DeSantis’ will (unlikely) or DeSantis will pull Florida out of those accreditation organizations and move to or create new ones that do his bidding. And this will work because he’s sure to have more than a dozen red states immediately follow him. The major accreditation groups serving Florida are regional ones covering the southeast US. Which are pretty much all red states with red state GOPer governance willing to stick it to the libs. They will follow DeSantis over a cliff because there’s nothing much to lose and everything to gain. The entire Republican machine is a personality cult now, and as DeSantis quickly replaces TFG as the cult-du-jour, there’s nobody that’s going to sit in their statehouse or their governor’s office and tell him no. Besides, most of them are going to be totally supportive of a higher education system that they can control in their own states.

Obviously, I’m not Nostradamus … but the tea leaves here are pretty clear as to what DeSantis is intending to do.

So let’s assume that this situation comes to pass and do some thinking. Should the rest of us care that DeSantis is doing this?

The immediate problem is two-fold, involving students and higher education faculty. Both are hurt as this unfolds. Students in Florida and the red states that join them are hurt as the value of their degrees in the marketplace begins to be questioned. Faculty are hurt as academics shun Florida universities and other red state institutions as an environment to teach and research in, and current employees watch their institutions wither and their control over their own classrooms evaporate. All of these have immense human costs.

But the political costs are the ones that I think this site ought to be talking about.

DeSantis isn’t hiding what he’s doing here. Institutions are incredibly hard to build and particularly easy to destroy. And while we’ve seen conservative GOPers chew around the edges of important institutions for decades now, DeSantis represents the completely fascist version of institution destruction where he shuts down one working set of systems that he hates and replaces it with another completely compliant system which operates under his complete control. Everything about this kind of takeover represents a direct attack on democratic governance. Institutions that are the result of decades of political compromise are tossed out WITH THE DIRECT INTENTION of destroying those decades of compromise and installing something completely out of reach of their political opponents.

The other big problem is that once MAGA politicians see that DeSantis is successful with his takeover, the race to the bottom is going to begin in earnest. Red state politicians are going to be hacking away at all kinds of institutions that they don’t like, and as long as they have super majorities in their legislatures, they aren’t going to be afraid of doing so. The talk of “red and blue divorce” is going to go mainstream in a hurry.

It’s that long shadow of this story that scares me most. All of this ultimately threatens the stability of the nation.

Nothing about what DeSantis is doing here is normal. Nothing about what DeSantis is doing here should be accepted. It might look like the higher education community is the only victim here, but the truth is that our system of democracy is plainly being attacked. We don’t set up parallel governance systems to get what we want. DeSantis is someone who absolutely intends on destroying that 246 year old agreement.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/24/2154778/-Will-accreditation-stop-DeSantis-takeover-of-higher-ed-Nope-His-plan-is-to-dump-it

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