In February, the University of North Carolina Wilmington held its Faculty Senate meeting and invited Dan Harrison, the UNC System’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Senior Advisor to President Peter Hans, to speak about a new accreditor that may be coming to the UNC System, the Commission for Public Higher Education.
“The first thing I usually say is that it's not a sales call, it's a listening call, because voluntariness is extraordinarily important, and we don't have the bandwidth to sort of pull institutions along who don't want to be there. So I want to hear from them about how it can be better, and about what they would like to see in accreditation,” Harrison said.
Announced last year in late June, CPHE emerged from the joint efforts of the public university systems in six states: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Like other accreditors, it will be an independent, non-governmental organization that provides quality oversight for universities; accreditation is required for a university and its students to be eligible for federal grants and loans. But it will also have its own specific areas that it can focus on.
Harrison said CPHE also needs federal approval so that it can provide accreditation — and so that schools accredited by CPHE would be able to receive Title IV student aid funds. In January this year, CPHE received a $1 million federal grant to help launch this effort.
Additionally, he said the goals of CPHE are to be a nationally recognized public university accreditor that leverages oversight from the state, including the auditor, and higher education commissions.
Listening tour
Harrison has been making the rounds, having also visited Appalachian State University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Chapel Hill. The first two universities have already signed a letter of intent to join CPHE when it gets established (Both UNC-C and App State have online landing pages about the planned switch).
Like App State and UNC-C, UNCW is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), which approves 10-year accreditation cycles. That’s been the case since the early 1950s, although a 2023 state law now requires universities to switch accreditors every decade — meaning UNCW’s next mandated switch is in 2033. However, the law doesn’t appear to prohibit universities from changing accreditors earlier. Cases in point, the current cycles for App State and UNC-C aren’t up until 2034 and 2033, respectively.
CPHE is still in an organizational phase, which has left some faculty who spoke to WHQR uncertain about whether Harrison has an official role there or if he’ll leave the system office where he’s worked since 2017. Some faculty also suggested that, even without advocating for CPHE, conducting the informational sessions while working for the UNC System could be a conflict of interest.
“We're not going to be in a place where we're a recognized accreditor by the Department of Education that is being staffed by personnel from the systems that founded it, that would be a major problem,” Harrison said. “So I anticipate transitioning off of this detail at some point in the near future, certainly before we're recognized by the department and [CPHE] will have staff that is fully the organization's.”
It’s been suggested that a prorated portion of Harrison’s $327,064 salary is being treated as an in-kind donation to CPHE. WHQR requested clarification from the UNC system on that, as well as on where he had an official role or title with CPHE.
Jane Stancill, a spokesperson for the UNC System, wrote that Harrison has "no formal title for CPHE. The majority of his salary is currently going to CPHE, and will be credited against monetary contributions from the UNC System and future dues."
UNCW has not made a commitment, and some of the next potential steps aren’t yet defined.
Andy Wallace, the director of media relations for the UNC System Office, wrote in an email that applying to CPHE “starts with a letter of intent that is signed by the institution’s chief executive. An institution’s internal procedures would govern whether and when its trustees are involved.”
Sydney Bouchelle, a spokesperson for UNCW, said that the university “does not have a protocol at this time for choosing a ‘new accreditor,’ and that UNCW has not sent a letter of intent to the system office about joining CPHE.
Meeting with Faculty Senate
According to the February Faculty Senate meeting minutes, Harrison “stressed that he was on a listening tour. He took many questions from the assembled members of the faculty.” Those questions were not documented in those minutes, so WHQR tried to contact five Faculty Senators, including Faculty Senate President Colleen Reilly, who were there, but none agreed to on-the-record interviews; some said they were worried about possible retaliation.
However, one Faculty Senator agreed to speak with WHQR on condition of anonymity, saying that they attended two events where Harrison spoke. One was at a virtual faculty forum on January 16, and the other was at the face-to-face senate meeting on February 17.
This senator said they were surprised to learn that the faculty and UNCW did have a choice in pursuing this new accreditor, CPHE, and that “I hope that the UNCW faculty will have significant input into the decision, since [they] do so much of the work in the accreditation process and since the outcome of the process impacts us greatly. (At least in the past, significant faculty participation has been required in the collection of data and in the preparation of the reports.)”
This faculty senate member described that it could be a “good thing” that CPHE is aimed at accrediting only public institutions, meaning that UNCW would “not have to deal with certain redundancies required by the inclusion of private institutions, [...] but I think people are worried that there are other, unstated reasons for the move.”
This faculty senator added they are “worried because there have been so many far-reaching new system-level policies passed down to us in the last couple of years that keep requiring us to scramble. It is overwhelming, and it feels like we are struggling just to keep up with an avalanche of changes. Too much change imposed from above, too fast, just naturally leaves everyone feeling suspicious. It feels like there's no time for dialogue, collaboration, and reasoned adaptation.”
The political context
The Assembly has done considerable reporting on CPHE’s creation and the scope of its operations within the UNC System; the new accreditor has emerged in a political moment that’s at times been charged.
Harrison said the need for a public accreditor like CPHE has long been discussed in higher education circles. But it has faced criticism that it is a partisan organization from the day of its announcement, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said CPHE would help “upend the monopoly of woke accreditation cartels,” according to the Palm Beach Post.
Another issue was the UNC System being questioned by SACSCOC for opening the UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership without sufficient input and feedback from its faculty. The introduction of CPHE came shortly thereafter, but according to The Assembly, the UNC System had long been in talks with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, which convened the representatives from those southern states on the issue of accreditation.
Within this context of the creation of CPHE, and the reluctance of UNCW faculty to talk to WHQR, Harrison said, “I remain surprised, perhaps naively surprised, at how much attention this effort continues to receive. I think some of the other faculty meetings I've gone to have been live-streamed, etc. I mean, the conversation at Wilmington was incredibly positive.”
Harrison said that he gleaned valuable feedback from the faculty at UNCW.
“There was a well-taken point raised that I hadn't heard before, about some blind spots that the organization may have by not having librarians on our advisory council or on our board of directors, so that's something that we're considering,” he said.
Criticism from academic union
While UNCW faculty were hesitant to discuss CPHE, the national chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an organization that has represented academic professionals since 1915, did offer some criticisms.
Isaac Kamola directs the Center for Defense of Academic Freedom for AAUP. He said there is a lot of fear in higher education right now.
“It's coming from the states, the governments in the states that are the CPHE, some of the most repressive states that have affected higher education that have denied academic freedom and gutted institutional autonomy, states like Florida and Texas, where at Texas A&M, you can't teach Plato anymore. In Florida, where they're censoring sociology textbooks,” he said.
While both Harrison and Kamola agree that university accreditation is a wonky policy area, Kamola understands that for UNCW faculty, it might not be “the top of everybody's priority, although I would say that it's an existential threat to higher education as we know it.”
One concerning aspect of the CPHE accreditation for Kamola concerns intellectual diversity.
“Intellectual diversity does not mean that there are enough Marxists in the business school; do we have an anarchist in the law school? Instead, it's going to be, do we have a conservative teaching this? Do we have anyone in the climate science department who denies climate change? The intellectual diversity is so vague,” he told WHQR.
Kamola said this pillar of CPHE comes from the Trump administration’s executive order on accreditation, which included a requirement that “accreditation requires that institutions support and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity amongst faculty in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.”
“We're going to institutionalize that by creating an accreditation agency in which this is now part of the process by which colleges are accredited, which is ideological, partisan, right-wing. This Executive Order is going to be institutionalized into the DNA of the CPHE,” Kamola said.
While, according to reporting from The Assembly in November, UNC Charlotte Chancellor Sharon Gaber has signaled her intent to join CPHE, she wanted assurance that components around intellectual diversity and academic freedom principles would be shored up, adding “several unknowns that exist that could potentially limit our ability to proceed with CPHE accreditation.”
Harrison said they’re working to finalize the evidentiary guidance on that intellectual diversity principle and will send the document when it's available. But he said it won’t be a survey of faculty beliefs, syllabi, or voting records — concerns that have been voiced by some faculty who have spoken to WHQR on background.
“What we're attempting to do is to see if there are policies and procedures in place at the institution which we would expect to reasonably give rise to an environment where a diverse range of opinions on a given topic are welcomed, and that's basically the end of it,” Harrison said.
Kamola said the AAUP still isn’t buying it.
“The whole premise of the CPHE is to replace the non-partisan, independent accrediting agencies with ones that are governed by the state, so that itself is political, right? There is the claim that the goal is to reduce overhead and all of that. But if you look at the standards, what is included in the standards is the loosening of oversight,” he said.
Harrison disagrees, “If we were to sort of compare our standards on that to some of the existing accreditors, I think there's a good argument to be made that our academic freedom standard, [for example], is actually more fulsome and better thought out.”
Kamola said these accreditors, which are closely aligned with the state, are not going to “call out violations of institutional autonomy or academic freedom or conflict of interest or malfeasance, if there's a state law that protects that right.”
Harrison reiterated that accreditation with CPHE would avoid redundancies and streamline various processes.
“That means relying on stuff that institutions nationwide report to college scorecards and [the National Center for Education Statistics] IPEDS into the department. And then what we say is these are the metrics that you're already having to compute and report that we care about, and we expect to see policies and procedures in place that are going to improve those metrics over time,” Harrison said.
Harrison adds that the accreditor's responsibility is quite different from that of the university’s president.
“It's the role of an accreditor to set standards and then call balls and strikes on those standards without fear or favor,” he said.
It's not yet clear what UNCW's next move will be, or who will have a role in the decision. And, again, UNCW technically has until 2033 to find a new accreditor, whether that's CPHE or another organization.
Meanwhile, CPHE is moving full steam ahead, opening up its application cycle for universities to join later this year — including schools beyond those in the six southern state systems that helped found the new accreditor.
“When we reopen our application process, we'll welcome applications from outside those six systems [...] [We’ll] reopen sometime this calendar year. We're not going to do a cohort again, per se. I think we'll just accept them on a rolling basis, which is how every other accreditor works,” Harrison said.
