The deepening crisis of campus illiberalism entered a new stage this past year. College and university boards and presidents now readily acknowledge that they have a big problem. Yet the accrediting bodies that bear the primary responsibility for schools ’ quality continue to act as if the problem of campus illiberalism does not exist. They persist in a now three-decade silence despite chronic hostility from staff and students to conservative speakers and worsening faculty and student self-censorship . One accreditor, the Western Association of Colleges and Schools Senior College and University Commission, even recently watered down its academic freedom standard.

Why aren’t accreditors, like boards and presidents, more concerned about campus illiberalism?

The disjunction here became more evident last academic year as college boards and presidents entered a new post-denial stage. From Hamline University to Stanford Law School to Furman University, they began to confront the problem more directly. Boards overruled presidents ( Hamline ), presidents and deans stepped in and pushed aside underlings ( Stanford Law ), and presidents took to the pages of leading newspapers to defend ideological diversity and free speech ( Furman ). Even the Chronicle of Higher Education noticed this new stage, reporting how college presidents have “changed their tune on free speech” and are now “denouncing would be censors on the Left and the Right.”

To date, however, no one seems much impressed or reassured. Administrators appear as powerless as ever to establish campus conditions for free and open debate, and faculty increasingly sit on the sidelines. Student mobs are more menacing than ever.

Under these circumstances, troubled boards and presidents should be able to appeal to the higher authority of their accreditors for assistance. At a minimum, accreditors should make it crystal clear that open and free debate is the very cornerstone of a university.

It is imperative that we understand their unwillingness to do so. The surprising source of accreditors’ silence goes beyond simple neglect and bureaucratic hubris. It reveals an extraordinary compromise and the accreditors’ hollow core.

To understand these points, we need to go back to the late 1980s when accreditors shifted abruptly to the goal of remaking universities into efficient factories of student learning. The problem was not the project’s goal of effective teaching. Nor was it the aspiration of holding universities accountable for “outcomes.” The problem was the Grand Canyon between how professors were trained and the accreditors’ new expectations for their job.

Traditionally, professors have been trained as scholar-experts in disciplines such as physics, philosophy, or accounting. The goal of their training is discovery, new knowledge, and scholarship. As disciplinary experts, they governed academic quality, and accreditors merely applied neutral rules established by the schools.

To take charge of quality, accreditors leveraged their role as gatekeepers for federal financial aid to introduce the concept of “student learning outcomes” and used this concept to turn the tables on the faculty. Under their new order, the only question that mattered was whether universities could show that professors were engaged in a “continuous improvement” process governed not by scholarly expertise but by data derived from carefully engineered learning experiments or assessments.

Without any change to faculty Ph.D. programs or on-campus training, this effort quickly foundered and led to an extraordinary compromise. The compromise was that campus administrators were permitted to present the faculty as making progress toward their new role, and accreditors indicated their willingness to accept those presentations as sincere and accurate. This hollow core of accreditors’ quality assurance is highly evident on today’s campuses, especially to faculty. Their universities engage in expensive and otherwise pointless masquerades to pretend to be complying with the accreditors when they aren’t actually doing so. On literally every campus, this farcical drama plays out annually with little resistance from all parties.

The accreditor’s hollow core helps us better understand their silence on campus illiberalism. Accreditors are preoccupied with the priority of faculty reconstruction. Their focus is on evaluating progress toward this priority, and free and open debate neither furthers nor impedes it. Their self-absorption filters out campus illiberalism and leads them to neglect deteriorating campus conditions.

But the hollow core suggests a still deeper source of the lack of concern with the illiberalism that is killing the American university. One sniffs here the distinct odor of contempt — contempt for the universities themselves and their faculties. It would appear to be present in the view that both need to be reconstructed and even more so in the accreditors’ determination to make the faculty bend at the knee.

It is tragic that in their quest to improve universities, accreditors have made them worse. Accreditors have become bloated bureaucratic organizations that fail to do their most important jobs: ensure quality instruction and the free exchange of ideas on America’s campuses.

So, the graduation message accreditors have for university boards and presidents is clear: When it comes to campus illiberalism, you’re on your own.

Robert Manzer is the president of the American Academy for Liberal Learning .