Florida’s Governor Escalates a Yearslong Fight With College Accreditors

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican running to be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024, has made no secret of his disdain for college-accreditation agencies. Last month he likened them to “cartels.”

This week he took those frustrations to new heights, with a lawsuit alleging the federal government has “ceded unchecked power” to the agencies.

“We refuse to bow to unaccountable accreditors who think they should run Florida’s public universities,” he said in a statement on Thursday.

The suit, filed in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, seeks to block federal officials from enforcing the standards that accreditors set for colleges to receive billions of dollars in student aid. In the complaint, Florida’s Republican attorney general, Ashley Moody, and other state lawyers accuse the Biden administration of being hostile toward GOP-led efforts in Florida to curtail the agencies’ longstanding authority.

The new lawsuit reflects that college accreditation has become a key battlefront for Republican politicians across the country who want to reshape higher education in their image, particularly as accreditors have come to favorably view diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Last month, DeSantis signed legislation outlawing diversity spending across his state’s public colleges; Texas’ Republican governor signed a similar bill into law last weekend.

“Overreach by state legislators is contrary to academic freedom,” said Cynthia Jackson Hammond, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, in an email responding to the suit.

In a statement to The Chronicle, the White House’s assistant press secretary, Abdullah Hasan, said the administration will fight to preserve accreditors’ ability to hold colleges accountable.

“Governor DeSantis is now bringing his culture wars, like book bans, to the long-standing system that helps ensure students receive a quality college education,” he said. “This administration won’t allow it.”

Teeing off DeSantis’s anti-accreditation push was a law he signed last year requiring many of Florida’s public colleges to change accreditors over the course of the next two years. The law, which also explicitly gave colleges the ability to sue their accreditors, came after the former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, approved easing accreditation requirements in 2019 under the Trump administration. Critics said the requirements would add to colleges’ bureaucratic burdens.

“It’s a little bit like allowing restaurants to sue the health inspector for giving them a failing grade,” said Edward Conroy, a senior advisor who focuses on education policy at the think tank New America.

Before the Florida legislation was enacted, James Kvaal, the U.S. under secretary for education, sent a letter to DeSantis urging the state to “consider the unintended consequences” of the law. Fast-tracking the painstaking accreditation process — which typically happens every seven to 10 years — could “lead to increased institutional burden and costs that may be passed down to students and families,” he wrote in March 2022.

The U.S. Education Department responded by putting in place a new standard requiring colleges to show “reasonable cause” for seeking new accreditors. In the lawsuit, Florida officials called that guidance unconstitutional, too.

DeSantis is biting from a “big legal apple” here, said Neal Hutchens, a professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in law and policy issues in higher education. For one thing, his team will have to address the fact that even though accreditation is required to receive certain types of federal dollars, it’s a voluntary system. That consideration could undermine some of their legal arguments. For another, the litigation is mired in politics.

“This is going to be a pretty uphill battle,” he said.