Accrediting Agencies Have Long Required Racial Preferences. Civil Rights Commissioners Are Now Pushing Back.

By Wenyuan Wu. Wenyuan Wu is Executive Director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. Excerpts:

"most accrediting agencies are still staunch supporters of DEI and racial preferences, having baked the ideological edict into strategic goals, organizational standards, mission statements, policy positions, etc. Following the Dear Colleague Letter from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent on February 14, 2025, the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC), which represents seven federally-recognized accreditors, issued a defiant response. In it, C-RAC accuses the OCR of interpreting the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) decision too broadly. Specifically, C-RAC argues that the ban on racial preferences should only apply to admissions decisions, not “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”"

"“Encouraging DEI” appears in the Code of Good Practice for the Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors. The only organization representing specialized and professional accreditors had a session on legal strategies to carry on DEI in accreditation at its Fall 2024 Conference.

For the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), DEI is “Guiding Principle 3,” dictating that member institutions should “address disparate impacts on an increasingly diverse student population.” “With equity at its core,” the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College & University Commission (WSCUC) recently reaffirmed its institution-wide commitments to the dogma."

"The goal of equitable student outcomes is also shared by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) in its standards, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) in its 2030 Strategic Plan, and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) in its 2023-2028 Strategic Plan."

"“[a]ccreditors have long been strong-arming colleges and universities into greater levels of racial preferences.” For instance, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the accreditor of public medical schools, had cited half of the 16 schools surveyed in public records requests “for being insufficiently diverse.” As early as 1988, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) had adopted diversity standards for the colleges and universities it accredited. Since 1990, WASC has pressured schools, including the Rand Graduate School of Policy Studies, Thomas Aquinas College, Caltech, Stanford, University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, into promulgating official “diversity statements.”"

"Throughout the 2000s, the American Bar Association (ABA) threatened to revoke George Mason University School of Law’s accreditation for its lack of racial diversity and issued multiple action letters demanding compliance with ABA’s diversity standards. In one of these action letters, ABA’s Accreditation Committee complained that the school did “not engage in any significant preferential affirmative action program.”"