The Commission for Public Higher Education launched last summer with the backing of six state systems. Officials argued that public institutions needed a new accreditor better suited to their needs. They criticized the current model as broken and suggested that new entrants will provide more choices at a time when legacy accreditors are facing greater scrutiny over costs and outcomes.
CPHE’s six founding members are the State University System of Florida, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina system, the University of South Carolina, the Texas A&M University system and the University of Tennessee system. The aspirational accreditor is now seeking federal recognition, a slow-moving process the Trump administration is working to accelerate for new entrants.
Last fall CPHE tapped Mark Becker to be its board chair. Becker was president of Georgia State University for nearly 13 years and spent another three as president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Now he’s leaning on that expertise to help launch CPHE, which just announced its inaugural CEO.
Becker visited the Inside Higher Ed offices in Washington, D.C., to discuss his work with the fledgling accreditor. Excerpts of the interview follow, edited for length and clarity.
Q: First, what was your interest in taking a role at CPHE?
A: From my time at APLU, I knew all the system heads except for one, because they were all active in APLU. So I was asked if I would look at this. Quite frankly, I saw the press conference that didn’t come out too well when it was announced. I had to basically call them one by one—not all of them, but enough—and ask, “What’s really going on here?”
It’s probably not welcome news to people in media, but one of the things I’ve learned in my life is when you see a news story, on a good day, it’s approximately true. And frequently it can miss the mark, particularly when you’re looking at local press. So I made some calls and I needed to be convinced this was not a political boondoggle, that this was a real attempt to do something innovative in higher education by focusing on a specific sector: public higher education. I believed that this was an opportunity to do something creative—particularly with the advent of [artificial intelligence]—as a start-up, to look at how to take what has been largely a bean-counting bureaucratic process and turn it into an outcomes-focused process that is both transparent and efficient.
Q: As you noted, CPHE was announced by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a fiery press conference where he railed against the “woke” “accreditation cartel” and made some untrue statements. Does that press conference reflect the direction CPHE is headed in? If not, why hasn’t CPHE distanced itself from DeSantis?
A: CPHE is focused on becoming a recognized accreditor through the U.S. Department of Education, and dealing with past media events is not our focus. Our focus is doing what we’ve said we’re doing, doing what we’re all about, whether you go to our website or press releases.
Q: What is your expected timeline for federal recognition as ED seeks to speed that process up?
A: Our goal is to accredit at least one institution. We have a cohort of 10 that we’re preparing to review right now, and we’re receiving self-studies, which we have to receive before we do the site visits and make decisions. But we expect to have at least one or more decisions by October, and then make our application with the department in November. It’s our understanding if we can make our application in November that we should expect a decision late 2027, early 2028.
Q: How are current accreditors falling short and what will CPHE offer that others don’t?
A: What we’re not offering is to accredit any eligible higher education institution. We’re just doing baccalaureate and above public institutions. This is going to be four-year institutions as well as those at the R-1 and R-2 level, so we’re not covering the rest of the landscape—we’re not doing community colleges, we’re not doing private institutions, we’re not doing for-profits—and that allows us to be much more focused.
If you take, for example, that we’re founded by six systems, the systems operate within a state context, and the states have a lot of requirements—in addition to what the federal government requires—because the states have skin in the game. They’ve invested money in these institutions, they’re regulated by the states, they’re regulated by boards, and generally at a system level, there’s a lot of processes. And there are a lot of things that these public institutions and these systems have to do.
They’re already meeting a number of the accreditation guidelines, because the federal government requires you to—particularly on the financial end, on the academic process, et cetera. We think that we can be much more efficient, because if we can document that this is already an established feature and the institution is working within that context, there’s no reason to basically reinvent the wheel and go make them jump through a different set of hoops.
Q: Some states, Louisiana, for example, are pushing their public universities to seek accreditation with CPHE. Do you worry that those efforts prioritize politics over matching a university with the best fit for them?
A: We were founded by six systems. That doesn’t mean that every institution within those six systems is going to go through CPHE. We are an option. That was one of the changes that came at the end of the last Trump administration and [that] the Biden administration carried forward: You’re no longer bound to your regional accreditor. So they now have a choice. I don’t know what the governor of Louisiana intends and what their desires are.
Q: You recently participated in a negotiated rule-making session on accreditation. Tell me about that process and the end result.
A: First and foremost, I thought the department negotiated in good faith. If you look at the document that they presented and at where we ended up, compromises were found. A vote for consensus wasn’t to say that you liked everything that’s in it, but it was seen as a good-faith compromise between where they started and where they could have gone if they didn’t have consensus.
Q: You pushed back in some areas—the obligation to monitor faculty research was a point of contention for you. Are you concerned about burdens like that being placed on accreditors?
A: I said in negotiated rule making, I didn’t believe that this belonged in the Department of Education’s purview. As far as funded research from the federal government, that’s already covered by policy through the Office of Science and Technology Policy out of the White House. The agencies all comply with that policy, and Health and Human Services, particularly NIH, has a very well-established Office of Research Integrity. What I pushed back on was any attempt to go broader than what is already understood as the federal government’s role in overseeing, monitoring and regulating research integrity. I thought that the initial language that was proposed was extremely beyond the pale of the role of the federal government, and it was overreach. I think I said that clearly, forcefully and repeatedly, and we got the compromise.
Q: Anything else you want to tell our readers?
A: We need to show that we are indeed going to be more outcomes-focused, more transparent, more efficient, and we’re able to do that by working with some specific set of institutions instead of having a set of practices that will be for all comers. So, when I say specific set, I mean public institutions. We have every intention—once recognized—of being a national accreditor. So we’re not limited to these six systems, and we welcome applications and interest from institutions that are not in the six systems. But the way that’s going to come about is by people actually seeing the result. Watch us for what we do instead of what is said.
Source link
#Board #Chair #Accreditor #Discusses #Timeline #Goals
