This week, five independent colleges—Benedictine College, Merrimack College, the University of Mount Saint Vincent, Bellevue University, and Houston Christian University—announced that they have joined as founding members of the National Association for Academic Excellence (NAAE). Their move could be momentous.
Spanning New England to Texas and the Great Plains, these institutions are helping to build a non-regional accreditor devoted to academic rigor, demonstrable student achievement, the formation of the whole person, and institutional autonomy. In doing so, they are challenging a system that has long offered few meaningful alternatives, and seeking to recover something American higher education has largely lost—freedom from the soft despotism that has come to characterize its accreditation regime.
For generations, the six regional accreditors exercised a de facto monopoly. Their standards, crafted to cover community colleges, massive state universities, and selective private institutions alike, inevitably flattened distinctions of mission. What began as peer review became, in practice, a mechanism for imposing generalized criteria that often had little to do with the distinctive purposes of independent colleges. After the 2020 federal reforms ended geographic exclusivity, the door opened to competition. NAAE has stepped through that door, insisting that accreditation should judge colleges by what their students actually learn, not just by whether they have completed the required paperwork, and that independent institutions should govern the standards that govern them.
Why does this matter? American democracy rests on the proposition, articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Education is indispensable to that regime. The Northwest Ordinance declared that “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The Founders understood that free institutions require free men and women capable of distinguishing truth from opinion, of exercising judgment, and of forming character. But when accreditation becomes an instrument for enforcing one-size-fits-all proceduralism or, worse, for subordinating inquiry to fashionable ideological conformity, it undermines the very conditions of self-government.
The presidents of the founding colleges have spoken with unusual clarity. Merrimack’s Christopher Hopey rightly asks why accreditation should remain bound to a 60-year regional model whose breadth produced standards “generalized enough to accommodate nearly every type of college and university.” Benedictine’s Stephen Minnis emphasizes that independent colleges contribute most when free to pursue their missions, including the formation of students according to faith traditions. Houston Christian’s Sandy Mooney notes the danger that documentation displaces meaningful improvement. Their objections go beyond red tape. They concern what colleges are supposed to accomplish and who gets to decide.
A number of scholars have warned us of “the crisis of the West”—the erosion of confidence in the capacity of reason to grasp permanent truths about human nature and the good. That crisis has been nowhere more evident than in the American academy, where relativism has too often displaced the classical and biblical inheritance that once formed the American mind. Regional accreditors, whatever their original intentions, have too frequently become vehicles for that displacement, pressuring institutions to subordinate their missions to extrinsic political or bureaucratic ends. NAAE’s explicit commitment to the formation of the whole person, including within faith-based traditions, and to outcomes rather than mere process, represents an urgently needed counter-movement. It reasserts that colleges should care about what their students learn and the quality of citizens they become, not just the credentials they earn.
Critics might call this “selective” or “exclusionary.” If so, they miss the point. Selectivity in the service of excellence is not the enemy of openness—it is, in fact, its precondition. Aristotle taught that excellence is a mean relative to us, determined by the nature of the activity and the capacities of those who pursue it. Independent colleges serve students of varied backgrounds and aims. They do so most effectively when free to define and pursue their missions without being forced into the Procrustean bed of standards designed for institutions with entirely different purposes. Competition among accreditors, properly ordered, can restore the diversity of institutional forms that once characterized American higher education and that the Founders expected would flourish under conditions of liberty.
In an age when many colleges have surrendered the authority to define their own ends, these five have chosen to reclaim it.
Lincoln taught that the principles of the Declaration are not static; they require a “new birth of freedom” when circumstances demand it. The same is true of academic freedom—rightly understood, which is the freedom for the pursuit of truth and the formation of free, self-governing citizens, not freedom from standards of excellence or truth.
The formation of NAAE is a genuine contribution to that new birth. It affirms that independent colleges exist to educate free human beings, not to treat them merely as customers or turn classrooms into vehicles for political advocacy. If more institutions follow their example, American higher education may yet recover its capacity to serve both the permanent questions of philosophy and the practical needs of a free people.
The colleges that have joined NAAE as founding members have chosen liberty over ideological conformity. Recovery of academic excellence begins the moment we stop treating the present arrangement as inevitable.