Emails Shed Light on UNC’s Plans to Create a New Accreditor

Last month, Peter Hans, president of the University of North Carolina system, casually dropped a bombshell announcement that the system and others were in talks to launch a new accreditor.

“We’ve been having a number of discussions with several other major public university systems, where we’re exploring the idea of creating an accreditor that would offer sound oversight,” Hans said at a UNC system Board of Governors meeting last month, The News & Observer reported.

Since then, no additional details have emerged, though Hans teased an update to come in July.

But public records obtained by Inside Higher Ed show UNC system officials have been quietly engaged in conversations about launching a new accreditor for at least a year, including discussions with unnamed collaborators in Florida, where the effort could be headquartered. UNC officials have also spoken with officials at the U.S. Department of Education, even getting a heads-up on what an April 23 executive order from the Trump administration on accreditation would entail. 

Here’s what those documents show.

‘The Florida Project’

In early April, UNC officials appeared ready to tell the world about their plans for a new accreditor that “would be publicly accountable, outcomes-based, and more efficient and effective in its reviews,” according to the draft of a statement that was never publicly released.

“We believe it is past time for the creation of a new accreditor focused on the unique needs of public colleges and universities,” the statement said. “We have worked collaboratively over the past year to explore and develop such a cross-state partnership.”

Andrew Kelly, a senior adviser to Hans, sent a draft of the statement to other UNC officials. The statement argued that accreditors “wield enormous power, but too often have opaque and counterintuitive governance” and fail to “focus on matters that are significant to students.” He argued in the statement that the current model “creates unnecessary duplication and cost, conflicts with the authority of state governments, and does little to ensure educational quality.”

An unidentified number of state systems of higher education were supposed to sign the statement, according to the draft.

Kelly drafted the statement in response to the Trump administration’s anticipated changes to accreditation, which included streamlining the processes for ED to recognize accreditors and for institutions to switch agencies, among other changes to the system that serves as gatekeeper to federal financial aid.

But the public did not hear about the UNC system’s quiet effort to launch a new accreditor until Hans spoke up at the May board meeting.

Other emails yielded some insights into whom the UNC system might be partnering with.

Daniel Harrison, vice president for academic affairs at the UNC system, sent an email on April 23 to fellow officials recapping a call with the U.S. Department of Education and what could be expected in the coming executive order on accreditation (which was issued shortly after his email).

In that email, Harrison also pointed to potential partners in the accreditation effort.

“An update on the Florida project—we met with the new entities [sic] attorneys and made substantial progress toward determining the legal structure of the new accreditor. It is likely to be a single member Florida nonprofit corp. Florida would be the sole member, but would delegate all delegable powers to a Board of Directors made up of the participating states,” Harrison wrote.

But despite having met with potential partners, UNC considered going its own way.

In a response to Harrison, Hans asked him to convene several system officials involved with the effort to weigh the pros and cons of “joining [a] multi-state coalition” or “forming a NC entity.” Email records obtained by Inside Higher Ed don’t show what the group recommended, but remarks made by Hans at May’s meeting indicate the system opted for the coalition approach.

UNC system officials did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

System leaders also appear to have discussed the effort with state legislators in private. On May 15, Hans asked senior vice president of government relations Bart Goodson to set up a meeting with Michael Lee, the Senate majority leader in the Republican-dominated Legislature. When Goodson asked about the topic, Hans replied, “accreditation update with good news.”

Lee did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

Potential Partners?

Like their UNC counterparts, other public systems are staying quiet on the effort.

Inside Higher Ed contacted a dozen public university systems, all in red states, to ask if they are partnering with UNC or others in an effort to launch a new accreditor, or if they participated in such discussions. Only two replied: the Arkansas State University system and the University of Alabama system. Both noted they had not been involved in those accreditation discussions.

The State University System of Florida—which did not reply to media inquiries—is the most likely potential partner, given the details in Harrison’s email and the governor’s recent political fury with accreditors. 

In 2022, Florida’s dark-red Legislature passed a law requiring state institutions to switch accreditors regularly. That move came after the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which accredited all 40 of Florida’s public institutions, inquired about a potential conflict of interest at Florida State University, which was considering Richard Corcoran for its presidency despite his role on the Florida Board of Governors. (He now leads New College of Florida.)

SACS also raised questions about an effort by the University of Florida to prevent professors from testifying against the state in a legal case challenging voting-rights restrictions. (UF later dropped that policy amid a torrent of criticism.) Both incidents occurred in 2021.

Following the 2022 law, some institutions began the process of switching accreditors, though state officials argued that the Biden administration slowed down that effort and Florida tried unsuccessfully to get a federal judge to rule the current system of accreditation unconstitutional.

Outside of Florida, North Carolina is the only other state with a similar law. In 2023, legislators quietly slipped a provision into a state budget bill that required state institutions to change accreditors every cycle. The law was passed with no debate among North Carolina lawmakers. The change came after UNC clashed with SACS in early 2023 over shared governance.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis did not confirm to Inside Higher Ed whether the state is launching a new accreditor, but recent remarks from the GOP firebrand suggest, albeit vaguely, that something is in the works.

“For too long, academic accreditors have held our colleges and universities hostage,” DeSantis said in an emailed statement. “These accreditation cartels have worked behind the scenes to shape university behavior, embedding ideological concepts like Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion Indoctrination into the accreditation process. If you weren’t meeting politically motivated standards, like enthusiastic participation in DEI, they would hamper your accreditation and access to federal funding. In Florida, we refuse to let academic accreditation cartels hold our colleges and universities hostage to ideology at the expense of academic excellence. Stay tuned.”

DeSantis also promised “more to come” on accreditation at an education event on Wednesday.

Long Road Ahead

Reactions to Hans’s announcement have been mixed.

Wade Maki, Faculty Assembly chair and a philosophy professor at UNC Greensboro, said he and other faculty members recently met with system officials to share their thoughts on the plan. 

“We had a very open conversation with the system office and shared our hopes that we get an accreditor that is independent, that maintains the strong reputation of the UNC system and helps keep the politics out of higher ed and the curriculum, whether that’s from the politicians or the accreditors themselves,” Maki said. “We’ve seen it come from both directions over the years.”

He also thinks the narrow focus of such an accreditor could be a positive.

“My leadership team, the Faculty Assembly Executive Committee and the faculty that we’ve talked to on campuses, we see the potential benefits of trying something like this, of having an accreditor that focuses just on the accrediting of state-supported public institutions,” Maki said.

Outside observers were more critical of the UNC system’s plans.

Accreditation expert Paul Gaston III, an emeritus trustees professor at Kent State University, argued that building an accreditor composed only of public institutions would omit valuable perspectives in review processes. He argued that colleges undergoing accreditation reviews benefit from the diversity of experiences from evaluators working at a broad range of institutions.

“What would be the advantage of, in a sense, separating classes of institutions for accreditation? I think one of the strengths of accreditation has been that it brings a variety of perspectives to the evaluation of a particular institution,” Gaston said.

Then there’s the arduous process of getting a new accrediting agency up and running; gaining federal recognition, which is required, takes years. Although Trump’s executive order on accreditation promised a smoother pathway to recognition for new entrants, it does not supersede federal regulations. 

“Becoming federally recognized, typically, is a five-plus-year process,” said Edward Conroy, a senior policy manager at the left-leaning think tank New America. Under current federal regulations, Conroy doesn’t expect the new accreditor to be recognized until 2030 or so.

Conroy also questioned whether the effort to create a new accreditor is about institutional quality assurance or political control.

“Everything Florida has done on accreditation over the past few years appears to be politically and ideologically driven, rather than about what is best for students and ensuring that they go to high-quality institutions and get a good education when they’re paying a lot of money for it and when taxpayers are investing a lot of money in public funding for higher education,” he said.

Conroy worries that state lawmakers in either Florida or North Carolina would require public colleges in their state to be accredited by their new accreditor. That would undermine the current requirement that colleges get to choose their own accreditor.

“It undercuts the principle of the higher education accountability triad, where states, accreditors and the Department of Education are all meant to do different things,” Conroy said. “If you have a state that becomes both, to some degree or another, the accreditor, as well as the state authorizing entity, then we’ve combined two legs of a three-legged stool.”