The following is a Letter to the Editor authored by NAAE’s Chief Accreditation Officer, Cecilia Livengood, in response to a March 20, 2025 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Higher Ed needs Checks and Balances.”
Structural checks-and-balances to promote greater tolerance of diverse viewpoints on campus should include a formal role for accreditation. The authors astutely observe that accountability derived from independent administrative or faculty self-governance has proven to be ineffective, undermining public confidence in higher education.
The most visible form of viewpoint imbalance – discrimination against certain political beliefs and those that hold them – merits serious attention. But the higher value of checks and balances through quality assurance is to help the institution promote stronger scholarship, marginalize partisan ideology, and welcome healthy, respectful testing of legitimate, contradictory hypotheses.
The academy’s fidelity to academic excellence and authentic scholarship through viewpoint diversity can be evaluated against accreditation standards applied to specific functional areas:
- Learning and library resources. Do they include abundant, diverse, and relevant learning resources appropriate for the programs and degree levels? Are they sufficient to support robust student and faculty research, dynamic classroom interactions and facilitate innovation?
- Faculty composition. Can the institution evidence that in alignment with its identity, faculty in aggregate represents intellectual diversity that promotes student access to a wide array of ideological perspectives? Does the faculty reflect the student population? Can the institution demonstrate that it utilizes recruitment and retention practices that safeguard intellectual diversity among the faculty? Are faculty hiring processes reviewed regularly and adjusted to assure ongoing quality and ideologic pluralism?
- Institutional Integrity. Does the institution remain neutral as an organization and enforce the expectation that behaviors on the part of faculty, staff, administrators, and others demonstrate respect and dignity for all? Is there evidence that the institution actively promotes the formation of ethics, integrity, and global awareness, and ensures its constituents maintain a respect for human dignity?
So-called “myside bias” is part of the human condition and not unique to the academy. But thoughtful, intentional, and structural remedies are available to ensure that the community of scholars mitigate each other’s biases in the noble pursuit of truth.