Minding The Campus: Can the US Afford to Politicize STEM Accreditation?

By Benjamin Bishop| Read The Article At Minding The Campus HERE

With China on track to produce nearly double the number of STEM doctoral graduates as the US by 2025, it is worthwhile to reflect on the national importance of these fields. A nation’s security and economic prosperity rely largely on STEM capability. Indeed, much of the historical success of the industrialized West was owed to dominance in STEM. Through the production of experts and the development of new technologies, western universities have played a critical role in maintaining and extending this capability.

Given its national importance and demographic challenges, the gradual substitution of politics for merit within STEM education is deeply concerning. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) loyalty oaths are now widely used to vet the political orthodoxy of academics. Certain faculty positions require a “commitment to anti-racist pedagogy.” Some institutions have even explicitly earmarked positions for particular races. For example, one announced that “The University has approved immediate searches for four faculty positions that were proposed by departments to increase the number of Black faculty.” These problems are well known—one excellent summary is John Sailer’s January 2023 article for the Free Press. However, little has been said about the politicization of STEM accreditation.

American colleges and universities are accredited regionally by organizations that consider the institution as a whole. In addition, particular programs are accredited by disciplinary accrediting bodies. In STEM, one of the most significant accreditors is ABET, which accredits programs in science, computing, and engineering. Historically, ABET has focused on the technical quality of programs. This might include having a sufficient number of faculty or adequate academic advising, for example. Recently, ABET has broadened its focus to include political activism.

In 2020, ABET released a statement praising the Black Lives Matter movement and condemning “systemic racism.” This statement implicitly accepts the rather controversial and partisan premise that the US is inherently racist. ABET has also been revising its accreditation criteria to incorporate DEI principles. The accreditation criteria are important because they are the standards that programs must meet in order to be accredited. If a program doesn’t meet the criteria, now including DEI, then it risks losing accreditation. These changes are problematic for a number of reasons.

First, they undermine accountability within public colleges and universities. According to ABET, the push to incorporate DEI into the accreditation criteria is supported by the Big10+ deans of engineering. Surprisingly, some of these deans represent public institutions in deeply red states—Indiana’s Purdue University and the University of Nebraska, for example. The changes to accreditation criteria help to justify controversial DEI measures in a way that cannot be challenged by the public or legislators. After all, who would want to risk the accreditation of their programs?

Second, accreditation will become more susceptible to human bias and abuse. When a program is evaluated by ABET, the evaluation is completed by a small team of experts during a campus visit. The accreditation criteria are deliberately vague so that the team has wide latitude in interpreting and applying them. With the inclusion of DEI, activist teams may misuse this flexibility to further their own political goals.

Lastly, the new criteria will not be applied uniformly. ABET accredits many programs within the US, but it also has a significant international footprint. Teams participating in international visits are expected to complete cultural awareness training and to conduct their work in a manner that is compatible with local cultural sensitivities. It’s hard to imagine how US-centric DEI criteria would be applied in, say, the Middle East.

So, what is the best way to depoliticize ABET and restore the primacy of merit in STEM? Just as the Chicago principles are helping to restore academic free speech, the Goldwater and Manhattan institutes have provided a much-needed blueprint for reining in DEI at public universities. However, it may be beneficial to extend this plan with measures specifically targeting politicized accreditors. In particular, state legislation is needed to prohibit the spending of public funds on such accreditors. This measure would accomplish two goals: First, accreditors like ABET would be put on notice that they must abstain from political activism. Second, the measure may give rise to apolitical, alternative accrediting bodies.

If reform efforts fail, we should expect a dismal future for STEM in the US. The Soviet experience with Lysenkoism should serve as a cautionary tale on mixing political ideology with the sciences. For the unfamiliar, Lysenkoism was an ideologically driven biological pseudoscience that is widely believed to have worsened famines that killed seven million people. Should American STEM be transformed into a similar political echo chamber run by DEI commissars? Or should true intellectual diversity be valued over diversity that is skin-deep?