The left worked hard for its dominance over higher education and doesn’t want anything to change. Now that there’s an administration hostile to “progressivism,” the scary stories about what could happen are circulating in the sympathetic press.

In today’s Martin Center article, Samuel Negus of Hillsdale College looks at the claim that the Trump administration wants to allow “Christian nationalists” to control college accreditation. He focuses on two recent articles.

Negus writes:

In one, Robert Shireman, a Democratic appointee to the committee that advises the secretary of education on the recognition of accrediting agencies, warns of an “accreditation war” driven by “Christian nationalism.” Republican “Christian nationalists,” Shireman believes, “don’t want their own, separate, accrediting agency; they want to force the rest of higher education to accept their radical beliefs.” The implicit premise here is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational and that conservative would-be reformers — not, say, Shireman and his colleagues at the progressive Century Foundation — are the extremist radicals.

Rhetoric like that plays well among Chronicle of Higher Education readers, but it’s absurd.

But if Trump and his allies get their way, won’t that harm educational quality, which accreditation protects? Negus challenges the assumption that it does:

The premise of Pillar and Shanderson’s argument is that accreditation serves as a mark of academic quality, legitimating institutions. Indeed, the regional agencies were created to do just that. But, since passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965, accreditors have been (if you will pardon the pun) progressively co-opted as fiduciaries of the federal state. Agencies are now required both to facilitate peer-review of member institutions’ academic and other operations and police those same members’ eligibility for federal funds. These functions are somewhat contradictory.

Many students coast through college learning almost nothing and accreditors do nothing.