A New State-Led Accreditor Risks Politicizing College Oversight

In the summer of 2025, Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, stood before a small, clapping crowd on the Florida Atlantic University campus and proclaimed that a group of like-minded—conservative—states had formed a nascent college accreditor.

The Commission for Public Higher Education, CPHE, as it is called, would “upend the monopoly of ‘woke’ accreditation cartels,” DeSantis said at the announcement. It would be antithetical to “the ideological fads that permeated those accrediting bodies over the years,” he said.

DeSantis’ take entirely misrepresented the American accreditation system. The job of accreditors deputized by the U.S. Department of Education is to assess the quality of colleges. They evaluate whether colleges are sound enough to qualify for federal student aid, a roughly $120 billion annual funding stream most institutions depend on to keep their doors open.

But while the Education Department selects which accreditors become sentinels of student aid, federal law expressly bars the agency from directly controlling them. Policymakers in part evolved the accreditor model to insulate these entities, and by extension colleges they review, from political interference. Government actors wouldn’t be the ones judging the academic enterprise, which would have afforded them an easier route to control, dictating curricula, muzzling disfavored research topics.

It was when DeSantis ran up against this firewall in 2021 that he began feuding with the accreditation system. By this point, DeSantis had made a national name spearheading a conservative takeover of state higher education, later infamously transforming the once-progressive New College of Florida from a well-regarded liberal arts institution into a right-wing epicenter that plummeted in public rankings and bled cash.

He had become enraged by the primary accreditor of Florida public colleges, which had raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest in a presidential search, and about three professors being blocked from testifying in a lawsuit against the state. The accreditor never punished colleges over the incidents, but they had clearly revealed to DeSantis where he might face speedbumps in his quest to subordinate Florida higher education.

That’s where the idea for CPHE hatched, born from grievances against the system. And it’s why its inauguration should define it going forward. At that rollout, DeSantis established he viewed the venture not as an accreditor, an independent evaluator, but rather as a vehicle to enforce political orthodoxy in the state. Other Republican-dominated states have climbed on board.

It’s a tactic seemingly endorsed by Republicans all the way up to President Donald Trump, who declared on the campaign trail that accreditation would be his “secret weapon” to liberating colleges from a leftist agenda. Since then, the administration’s top higher education official has since spoken about a “revolution” in accreditation.

State policymakers who might gravitate toward CPHE should be cautious about engaging. When states endorse the project, it grows stronger, and its representatives have offered no evidence they can stop the partisan forces backing it, like DeSantis, from commandeering CPHE for political interference.

In the 1950s, when the federal government began distributing GI Bill aid, it turned to accreditors to ensure the money wouldn’t reach colleges that would provide veterans with an anemic or scam education.

Accreditation is a piece of the broader higher education accountability system that’s designed to be insulated from political meddling. As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2024, while the federal government has an interest in guaranteeing a quality higher education system, it cannot “exercise control over educational curriculum,” for instance.

CPHE, as it is structured, would demolish the barrier between government and accreditors. Technically, CPHE is a nonprofit under the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees one of the state’s public higher ed systems. The Florida board holds the authority over the nonprofit, but a separate panel, composed of officials from the six public college systems that founded CPHE, would “establish accreditation standards, policies, and procedures,” including approving institutions for accreditation, according to CPHE’s business plan.

But also in that document, CPHE describes itself as “accountable to states”—the same states that have been deliberate in trying to put more of higher education under government control. Officials that fund and govern public colleges would now also be able to influence what’s meant to be an independent review of those institutions.

When lawmakers control the minutiae of higher education, they can decree what ideas are acceptable to discuss, a death knell for the academic freedom that makes the American higher education apparatus “the envy of the world,” as one Brookings Institution scholar described it. Censorship in academe inevitably spills out into broader society and soils democracies. The consequences can be profound and long-lasting, as those under authoritarian governments know too well.

Florida has been visible in how it has taken over public higher education, but other states in the founding CPHE class—Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—have pursued similar actions.

Texas, like Florida, has moved to block colleges from employing workers with certain visas. One Texas public university also recently nixed its women’s studies program and revamped syllabuses for hundreds of courses after the lawmaker-appointed governing board last year restricted how race and gender can be discussed in classes.

In 2023, North Carolina had similar dustups to Florida with its legacy accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, or SACSCOC.

The accreditor questioned whether the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill governing board had ignored faculty and administrator input as the institution stood up a School for Civic Life and Leadership.

This drew ire from Republicans, and late that year, the legislature approved a law mandating public colleges change their accreditor from SACSCOC. Florida had passed a similar law in 2022. At the time, the Florida and North Carolina laws drew heated statements.

Coalition for Carolina—a group of UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, alumni, and others, that fights to protect the state flagship school from partisan influence—said then that the legislation pushed “an extremely costly, unnecessary, and burdensome change to the accreditation process” on University System of North Carolina institutions.

Federal statute also directs that colleges’ pick of accreditors to be “voluntary.” The forced switches seemed to chafe against this requirement.

Iowa isn’t an initial CPHE member, but is emulating the founding CPHE states. Lawmakers this session are pushing through a raft of bills cementing a takeover. State Republicans have already advanced bills that would stop public institution presidential search committees from revealing candidates’ names, and end the regent board student member’s voting power.

One particularly problematic Iowa bill would mandate that the state’s public colleges join CPHE, which certainly doesn’t seem like it would meet the definition of voluntary. (CPHE has not taken a public position on the proposal.)

CPHE claims it is apolitical—”and nonideological in its goals, conduct, conversations, and work products,” an official representing the accreditor, Dan Harrison, said in a statement to New America.

Its “mission and methods are based on observations about accreditation that span decades and that pre-date the current political moment," said Harrison, vice president for academic affairs at the UNC system. “The more CPHE engages stakeholders, the more those stakeholders see that CPHE is reasonable and diligent."

However, based on the public evidence, CPHE simply cannot guarantee that partisans like Trump and DeSantis will not use it to do states’ bidding.

Again, these are states that regard higher education exclusively in political terms, that want to censor and erase certain subjects from the classroom, that want to install politicians in college presidencies, that want to destroy the separation of academia and government.

Under these conditions, CPHE almost certainly will become a part of the campaign to subjugate American higher education to political powers.