The Trump White House has taken a hammer to the skin-deep, equity-focused “antiracism” that was a hallmark of the Biden administration. But the evangelists of diversity, equity, and inclusion endure, continually demanding identification of and opposition to supposed instances of racism by weighting the scales of equality toward the balance of “equity.”

This is all, of course, in defiance of a raft of executive orders to the contrary.

Because of this, President Trump has set his sights on what some may deem an unlikely culprit: college accreditors. These organizations have wielded significant power in shaping the face of higher education since the 1960’s. And that power has brought with it a host of discriminatory ills that have done nothing to improve the return on investment of a modern college education.

The college accreditation process is a formal recognition that an institution meets specific standards of educational quality and academic rigor — or so we are told. But increasingly, the power wielded by accreditors to certify programs, colleges, and graduate schools across the country bears less of a relationship to academic rigor, and more to shaping higher education in the mold of race essentialism.

That’s not just bad for the colleges under scrutiny, it’s bad for higher education overall.

To understand how easily radical ideologues can manipulate the accreditation process requires a basic understanding of the process itself.

© The Hill