Regulating Academic Freedom

Sometimes running a newsletter and podcast series on a super broad topic like “education, kids, and families” means you can jump into a news item, a book, or a column at length. Sometimes you do it because it speaks to something you’ve been trying to engage with, or re-engage with, for a while. Today’s guest is an example of that. We’re talking with Katie Rainwater, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a faculty member at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education.Katie recently co-wrote a piece on proposed federal accreditation rules that would undermine higher education across the country. If you follow me here at all, you know that general theme is something we cover here too. And last spring, I sat down with Katie’s colleague Isaac Kamola at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, to talk about some of these issues as well.One of the big issues I’m watching for over the next several weeks is the regulatory environment around the new federal scholarship tax credit, whose benefit to public schools is real—but could be restricted by the U.S. Treasury’s regulatory process. So heading into the fall, it’s a good time to check in on what to expect, and why it’s exactly through the tedious processes of regulation and paperwork that some of these big policy changes are happening. A Conversation with Katie RainwaterYou recently wrote about proposed federal rules that would make some pretty significant changes to the way colleges and universities are accredited, including giving the federal government and states more leverage over the accrediting process. For someone who hasn't been following this debate, what is actually being proposed here—and why should people outside higher education care about it?I think what is being proposed is a set of rules that destroys the independence of the accreditation system. So universities, they’ve long had independent accrediting bodies that review what’s going on in the university to ensure that it’s a quality university, right? That students aren’t wasting their money. That the government is not wasting their money by giving loans for students to pursue a degree at that university, right? So these are independent bodies that serve to review institutional quality. What the proposed rules do is they really take away the independence of accreditors, and they do this in two ways. The first is by saying that it’s the role of the accreditor to ensure that the university is following state law. This has long been a goal of the Right, including the Heritage Foundation. They want to return education to the states, right? We see this with the attempted demise of the Department of Education. And again, with these accrediting bodies, right, there’s been legislation proposed by [Governor Ron] DeSantis When he was in the House of Representatives, to enable states to create their own accreditors.So this basically means that independent accreditors cannot say, hey, look, this state law is going to impinge upon the quality of your institution if you follow it. Instead, they have to be telling the university, okay, here’s all the state laws, are you following these or not? And then the second thing that the rules do that’s really alarming is they’re much more kind of prescriptive than the existing proposed rules. And so the existing proposed rules basically say accreditors need to assess institutions in 10 general areas, but they don’t really say like in this area, this is what a quality institution would be. But the new rules, they’re very prescriptive and they basically say that you’re going to need to ensure that the universities have this set of kind of standards in place.You argue that these seemingly technical accreditation changes could give states much more control over what happens inside public universities. What would that actually look like on a campus?So just to take, you know, the example closest at hand to me, I’m a sociologist in Florida, right? And so what the state has done over the past two years is they’ve said, we want to reduce student access to sociology in Florida. We don’t like this discipline. We think it’s left-wing. We think it’s ideological. We don’t think it’s a real science. And so, it’s not going to be allowed to be included as an option for students to take within the general ed curriculum. These new proposed rules would basically require a state like Florida to enforce legislation like SB 266, which introduces all of these restrictions on what can be taught in the general education.One of the things that jumped out at me was the connection between accreditation and academic freedom. How could these rules affect what professors can teach and what kinds of research universities support?Academic freedom is really the bedrock of the university. And the reason why is that, in order for there to be public trust in a university, you need to ensure that professors have the independence to kind of pursue the truth, right? And they’re not going to modify their research findings or they’re not going to frame their discussions of topics in class in order to appease a set of donors or a set of politicians, right? So universities need to have academic freedom. And what’s interesting about the proposed rules is they actually require accreditors to introduce a standard on academic freedom. But this doesn’t really improve anything because all of the major accreditors already have standards on academic freedom, but what the proposed rules also do is they say that no standard can be enforced, which contravenes state law. And so in Florida, we have all of these state laws that really interfere with faculty’s ability to exercise academic freedom. So just to give a couple examples:We have this law about countries of concern, which is designed to end research partnerships that faculty might have with other faculty and countries like China, Iran, Venezuela, right? Under these proposed rules, the accreditor can’t say, hey, look, there’s this issue where faculty aren’t able to engage in the research partnerships they need to engage in in order to pursue the projects they find important. Instead, they have to ensure that those universities are enforcing that law. And then in terms of the classroom, again, with general education, the accreditors need to ensure under this that any laws with regard to curriculum, and some of these laws have even been found unconstitutional. We found Florida’s Stop Woke Act is now enjoined. But accreditors, while these laws are still in the books, they would need to ensure that they’re being enforced. This could limit students’ exposure to ideas that the state government in power doesn’t want them to be exposed to.And so in Florida, we’ve seen restrictions on teaching about race, gender, these types of topics.You also raise the possibility that the new emphasis on “student success” and economic returns could affect which degrees universities offer and even which students they admit. How seriously should people take that possibility?I think people should take this extremely seriously. So if we look back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation said that one of their goals is to rebalance post-secondary education to get more students involved in workforce education, right? And so I want to say at the outset that getting training in a trade is like it’s not necessarily a bad thing. And especially, you know, for those that weren’t going to pursue college or weren’t going to pursue a university. But what the Heritage Foundation wants to do is it wants to take students that were going to go to college, were going to go to university, and get them into the workforce faster and ensure that they’re kind of, you know, getting training that they can just quickly use on the job instead of getting a kind of liberal arts education that will allow them to participate more fully in our democracy.And so one of the things that these proposed rules do is they say that there’s like a number of different pretty quantitative metrics that are introduced in terms of student success. And so some of these metrics are like, what’s the return on investment of a degree? Is a student going to be making more with that degree than they would be making if they entered the workforce straight out of high school, right? What the Department of Education could do is they could use these proposed rules to tell accreditors in order to maintain accreditation, you need to slash degree programs like women and gender studies or like sociology that aren’t offering a high return on investment. And I want to say that in the proposed rules, there are provisions that are going to require cost cutting all around. So one of the things that the proposed rules require is they require that the institutions maintain a sufficient flexibility in staffing.Finally, this is happening through what sounds like a pretty obscure regulatory process. What can faculty, students, and ordinary members of the public actually do right now—and does public comment have a realistic chance of changing the outcome?In this case, maybe so, because the federal rules essentially require the Department of Education to review every comment and to respond to it before implementing the proposed rules. And so the Department of Ed, they have a relatively short timeline. They have to respond to all of these rules by November.And so lots of public comment in this case could actually slow down the implementation of the rules or even open the Department of Education up for a lawsuit if they don’t sufficiently consider the rules. Unfortunately, public comment did just close yesterday. However, these proposed rules are catastrophic.And what we really need is we need everyone with a stake in higher education. So we need students, we need parents, we need university administrators to go on the record and kind of publicly say these proposed rules are going to be catastrophic for higher ed. They shouldn’t be implemented. And so, you know, if you’re involved with the university, I would encourage you to try to get your administration to make a public statement listing their concerns with the proposed rules.Katie Rainwater is a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a faculty member at Florida International University. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit joshcowen.substack.com/subscribe