Choosing Quality: A Queer History of Voluntary Accreditation in the United States Since 1984

• In Event: Higher Education Policy Influencers: The Impact of National, State, and Third-Sector Agendas on Postsecondary Education

Abstract

This paper begins from the presumption that higher education institutions, policymakers, nonprofits, and other actors are inextricably bound in a web of mutuality that extends through time and space (Coole & Frost, 2010; Harris, 2023). The question here is not "do these actors influence each other?" They can’t not. Extramural actors influence higher education institutions, and vice versa. From this point of view, the question turns to the peculiar insistence that accreditation in the United States is and has always been voluntary. This study explores the effects of life within this paradox. The research question, or paradox, under study is: how do institutional actors free themselves from quality within a system that already marks them as free?

"Voluntary" signals an action of will: as agential actors, institutions choose to submit to accreditation every year. To be willful in this case would thus mark the reverse. Willful institutional actors deviate from the straight line of choosing quality. This paper charts these various deviant lines to form a queer history of voluntary accreditation in neoliberal times, or a history of willfulness within and against this voluntary system (Ahmed, 2014, Ingold, 2016). Sources for this work include official statements from Presidents and other senior administrators at higher education institutions that critique voluntary accreditation in the wake of "Involvement in Learning" (Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984), a major Reagan-era push towards neoliberalizing accreditation. The queer history of voluntary accreditation emerges in the ungoverned lines these willful statements form – some of which insist the system become more captured by capitalism, others requesting a reprieve, all minor emergences of freedom, none liberatory on their own.

The voluntary nature of accreditation in the United States has been incredibly durable in part because any criticism of the system can be easily rebuffed with: "this is the system you’ve chosen." A queer history of voluntary accreditation gives insight into the various ways that actors indeed attempt to choose differently within a web of mutuality. These instances where administrators remain queer to the straightened version of quality that accreditation demands contain the possibilities of life beyond this durable system.

Author

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, University of Nevada, Reno