What’s in Store for the Future of Accreditation?

ACRL Webinar Urges Librarians to Respond to Proposed Rule Changes

Posted on September 24, 2026 in Blog Posts, Webinars

This piece was originally published in ACRL Insider. You can read it here.

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As part of its advocacy efforts, ACRL provides timely and helpful information on how academic librarians can best navigate challenges facing higher education. On September 14, ACRL’s latest webinar, “ACRL Presents: U.S. Department of Education Proposed Rule to Revise Accreditation in Higher Education,” sought to do just that.

The Trump administration recently proposed changes to the long-standing accreditation process that seek to upend the current system. Many higher education institutions rely on federal financial aid to make higher education accessible to a wider range of students, so the impacts of this could be significant.

For context, all colleges and universities in the United States must meet accreditation standards to receive federal financial aid (including student loans and Pell Grants), ensuring that institutions maintain academic quality, financial stability, and student support, among other measures. Accreditation establishes baseline quality standards and is determined by independent accrediting agencies, like the American Bar Association for law schools or the American Library Association for library schools. Accreditors have historically been granted freedom from government oversight to set their own standards.

What are the specific changes being proposed? In August, the Department of Education issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks to “revise the existing accrediting agency recognition regulations” in line with the Trump administration’s political agenda. In practical terms, this raises the following key points of concern, which panelist Mike Gavin outlined during the webinar, and which Jeremy Bauer-Wolf also delineates in his “Cheat Sheet” for New America:

1. Rendering peer review, which has been crucial for regulation, optional
2. Lowering the requirements and waiting period for new accreditors’ approval
3. Vaguely defining academic freedom and granting the Department of Education the power to override an accreditor’s enforcement decisions
4. Requiring accreditors to enforce intellectual diversity, which is defined in political terms (i.e., fostering more conservative ideas on campuses)
5. Weaponizing civil rights by ensuring that accreditors require institutions to uphold the administration’s anti-DEI views, essentially functioning as its “DEI police”

To help academic librarians figure out how to best respond to the proposed changes, the webinar brought together Mike Gavin, CEO of the Alliance for Higher Education, and Lisa Varga, Chief Advocacy Officer for ALA’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office, for a discussion moderated by ACRL President and Dean of the Georgetown University Library, Dr. Alexia Hudson-Ward.

Individuals and organizations were invited to submit public comments on the proposed changes until September 21, 2026, and both Gavin and Varga encouraged attendees to do so, given what’s at stake. To facilitate the process, the Alliance for Higher Education even created a Public Comment Toolkit, though Gavin urged respondents to personalize their responses as much as possible. As Dr. Hudson-Ward noted from the outset of the session, “accreditation may sometimes seem removed from the day-to-day work of libraries, but it is deeply connected to how our institutions demonstrate educational quality, effectiveness, and student success.”

At the crux of this issue is the fact that conditioning accreditation, and by extension federal student aid, on an institution’s ideological compliance (e.g., by discarding DEI) is a “blatant [attempt] to keep working-class Americans and people of color from accessing higher education and a better life,” as Gavin asserted during the webinar. He further contended that “DEI is being used as a dog whistle to further marginalize people who have been completely marginalized.”

Tying this back to the ongoing attacks on intellectual and academic freedom that ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has been tracking, Varga noted that the proposed changes fit into the “wholesale … effort to remove entire swaths of information” that they’re witnessing, which is especially damaging at the academic level. Attesting to the severity of this situation, attendee Bethany Jennings, a professor at Delaware Law School, Widener University, pointed out that “the ABA, which is [the] current law school accreditor, recently removed specific requirements for library collections and the result has been that several law libraries have drastically reduced collections and budgets.” Attendee Amy Filiatreau of the University of Mary Washington also shared in the chat that she sees “this as equivalent to No Child Left Behind—removing standards requiring libraries in K–12—and now a lot of areas don’t have school librarians at all. This could [mean] academic librarians/libraries going away entirely if this goes through.” The similarity, she later attested, has also been expressed by others in the profession.

Varga argued that the best way to respond in this moment is to file a comment to defend not only your institution but also the future of academic freedom. In response to some attendees expressing fear of retaliation, the panelists pointed out that comments could be submitted anonymously and further underscored the importance of submitting as many as possible. Sentiments clearly shifted after that, with a renewed commitment to sharing comments expressed by almost all. When one attendee asked about possible avenues for litigation, seeing that as a more effective means of challenging the rule change than public comments, Gavin remarked that those opportunities likely won’t arise until a year or two down the line, when faculty and students start seeing their academic freedom actively infringed upon by the rule change. When that time comes, both he and Varga noted that the comments submitted now will be crucial for building the case against the rule change by establishing the harm it causes. “You may not see the impact of your effort for quite a while, but this effort actually could make a huge difference,” Gavin contended, as he urged attendees to issue as many public comments as possible, and more importantly, to make them as specific as possible.

To end the session, both Varga and Gavin reaffirmed that librarians are ideally positioned to positively impact this issue by leveraging their experience, knowledge, and skills. Across the board, librarians are committed to upholding academic integrity, freedom, and diversity, and their collective voices can be powerful.

The webinar is now available below and streaming on YouTube for anyone who missed it or would like to rewatch it. Viewers can also sort through the full archive of past ACRL Presents webcasts on ACRL’s YouTube channel.

Watch Here:

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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

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