The Trump administration announced Friday it is moving forward with dismantling the American Bar Association’s (ABA) stranglehold on U.S. law schools, which allowed the organization to force left-wing ideologies on legal education at the threat of revoking accreditation.
Department of Education staff recommended that the ABA lose its status as the only officially recognized accreditor of American law schools, starting a process that will send the recommendation to the Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), and then to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent for review.
“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” Assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”
The ABA was already scheduled to have a hearing before NACIQI in September, and many have said such a hearing could be an avenue to block renewal. An official familiar with the matter told The Federalist that part of the September meeting is about resolving some mostly unrelated issues brought up at a prior renewal hearing.
The Education Department’s Friday move is a new line of attack against the ABA, but the official said that loss of the ABA as an accreditor would likely still open the door for a university’s law school to be accredited under the umbrella of the full university’s accreditation, if it is affiliated. Law schools not affiliated with a larger university rely on accreditation to be eligible for federal student loans.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the recommendation, the Department of Education prepared a report of nearly 500 pages that details the ABA’s lack of fitness to have so much authority over law schools and states the association does not maintain enough independence from the legal profession to be a trustworthy accreditor of educational offerings.
“The American Bar Association has abused its role as the nation’s main law school accreditor to push leftist ideology in the legal profession,” Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said on social media. “The ABA lost its credibility long ago. Now it will finally face the repercussions of prioritizing political agendas over the law.”
As The Federalist reported, movement against the ABA from outside groups has been mounting, and the Trump administration has likewise targeted university accreditors generally, and specifically the ABA, because of its political activism. Earlier this week, the Department of Education published a proposed rule that would make it easier to recognize new accreditors across higher education. Trump has called accreditation a “secret weapon” to rein in the far-left institutional capture of higher education.
Despite the fact that the ABA claims to have stopped some of its more overtly discriminatory requirements, such as affirmative action hiring or DEI programming for law school students, groups like Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) maintain those overtures are simply biding time until a Democrat administration comes back in.
