The Cartel Cries Foul: Why University Presidents Are Panicking Over Their Monopoly

If you want to witness true, cinematic panic, don’t look at horror movies. Look at the public comment section of a federal regulatory docket when university presidents realize their golden moat has a leak.

This week, the American Council on Education (ACE)—flanked by a coalition of 45 major higher education lobbying associations—submitted a scathing set of formal comments to the Department of Education. The target of their outrage? The proposed Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) rule.

Higher ed trade groups are sounding like a coalition of indignant medieval dukes whose royal charters are being audited by the crown. They warn that the proposed regulations—which would strip regional accreditors of their ability to second-guess state governing boards, tie accreditation to federal economic metrics, and enforce intellectual diversity compliance—represent an “unprecedented intrusion into institutional autonomy” that will “hollow out peer review” and destroy higher learning as we know it.

It’s almost touching to watch college presidents suddenly rediscover a passionate, poetic love for “academic autonomy.”

Almost.

Because if you peel back the rhetoric about “the integrity of peer review,” what you are actually looking at is a textbook cartel panicking because the federal government just figured out who holds the strings.

The Moat That Ate the Profession

For nearly a century, the corporate higher education lobby loved institutional accreditation. In fact, they worshipped it.

Why? Because institutional accreditation is the ultimate regulatory moat.

Under the current setup, the legal authority to grant an academic credential, validate course credit, and tap into the $135-billion federal student aid trough is permanently tied to the physical, state-chartered institution employer-enroller. It doesn’t matter if you are the most brilliant philosopher, biochemist, or historian on planet Earth: if you don’t work inside an accredited college or university, you cannot legally certify that a student has learned anything.

Accreditation wasn’t designed to protect the “knowledge commons.” It was designed to enclose it.

It ensured that if a 19-year-old wanted an undergraduate degree, they couldn’t just hire a great scholar down the street. They had to buy the whole corporate package. They had to pay for the campus recreation center, the luxury lazy river, the multi-million-dollar athletic coaches, the marketing department, the chief diversity vice provost, and the interest on a $500-million bond issue.

Accreditation allowed the corporate university (Universitas) to run a legally enforced bundling racket. They bundled the direct relationship between teacher and student with hundreds of thousands of dollars of corporate real-estate debt.

And for decades, university administrators sat comfortably behind that accreditational moat. They used that monopoly to reshape the academic workforce into an exploitative corporate hierarchy:

• Churning out an instructional workforce that is now 68.2 percent contingent and ineligible for tenure,
• Paying part-time adjuncts an insulting national average of $4,093 per course,
• Slashing real faculty purchasing power by 9.5 percent since 2019,
• While private doctoral university presidents quietly pocketed median salaries of $850,000.

As long as the regional accrediting bodies (like SACSCOC or the Higher Learning Commission) kept rubber-stamping their campuses and the Title IV federal loan dollars kept flowing, the university presidents were thrilled with the system. They called it “self-regulation.” They called it “the envy of the world.”

Then the political winds shifted, as they inevitably do.

When the Landlord Gets Audited

Enter the AIM rule, specifically provisions like § 602.23(j).

Suddenly, federal regulators and state politicians realized something very basic: Wait a minute. We fund this entire circus. Why are we letting a private club of college presidents tell us what we can and cannot do?

The proposed rules effectively tell institutional accreditors to back off. They direct accrediting agencies to refrain from interfering with state governance decisions, board of trustee appointments, or state-mandated curricular audits. In short, the federal government and state legislatures are converting accreditors into glorified advisory bodies.

Now, the ACE and its 45 member organizations are crying from the rooftops. They are acting like victims of an authoritarian coup.

They aren’t victims; they are just bad capitalists who forgot how their own monopoly worked.

When you build your entire business model on a state-enforced credentialing monopoly, you don’t actually have independence. You have an uncollateralized concession from the state. The second a hostile political administration takes power, or a state legislature decides to play culture-war hardball, or the economy takes a hit, that same monopoly machinery can be turned against you overnight.

Watching the higher ed lobby cry about federal overreach after spending fifty years relying on federal Title IV exclusivity to crush independent competition is like a casino boss calling the police because the state gaming commission changed the house odds. You built the casino inside their jurisdiction, pal. What did you think was going to happen—and has happened repeatedly over the centuries?

The Faculty Delusion: Clinging to the Accreditational Shield

The most tragic part of this spectacle is not the panic in the executive suites. It’s the reaction from faculty unions and senates.

Across the country, organizations like the AAUP and well-meaning faculty leaders are rushing to the defense of these very same regional accreditors. As seen in recent debates over § 602.23(j), faculty are filing comments begging the Department of Education to preserve the policing power of groups like SACSCOC. The argument goes: If the accreditors can’t threaten to pull a university’s accreditation, state politicians will dissolve our faculty senates and gut tenure!

It is a stunning case of Stockholm syndrome.

Institutional accreditors have watched universities systematically replace tenured professors with poverty-wage gig workers for forty consecutive years, and they didn’t revoke a single major university’s accreditation for it. They watched executive salaries triple while real faculty wages cratered, and they happily signed off on the re-accreditation paperwork.

Accreditors were never a shield for faculty. They were the bouncers for the institutional employer.

Relying on an institutional accreditor to protect your academic freedom is like asking the landlord’s insurance adjuster to protect your right to decorate the living room. The adjuster doesn’t care about your wallpaper; they only care about whether the building generates enough cash to pay off the mortgage.

When faculty senates get dissolved by legislative edict—as we’ve seen at Auburn and Cleveland State—it isn’t because the accreditors lacked enough paperwork. It’s because faculty inside a corporate university are subordinate employees (locatio operarum) operating on somebody else’s real estate.

If you are an employee on an institutional payroll, your “shared governance” is just a polite suggestion that the boss can shred the moment the federal government threatens their funding.

The Way Out: Portable Licensure

The panic over the AIM rule proves what the Professional Society of Academics has argued for thirty years: Institutional accreditation is a structural trap.

You cannot secure academic freedom by tethering it to a multi-billion-dollar corporate campus. A campus is an enormous, immobile, debt-ridden hostage. It has bond ratings to protect, federal indirect-cost pipelines to maintain, and corporate donors to appease. The moment the state squeezes the campus, the campus will sacrifice its faculty to survive.

The only permanent escape is a Great Decoupling. We need to blow up the institutional accreditation monopoly and replace it with Portable Licensure.

Think about how every other serious profession operates:

• The Law: A state bar association licenses the attorney. If a law firm gets sued, goes bankrupt, or gets bought out by an unethical corporate conglomerate, the attorney takes their license, packs their files, and hangs a new shingle down the street. The firm doesn’t own their legal authority.
• Medicine: A medical board licenses the physician. If a hospital administration starts imposing junk policies or cutting patient care to pay for a new administrative wing, the doctor retains their credentials and their right to practice. The hospital building doesn’t grant the MD.

Higher education is the only major intellectual field where the authority to practice is welded to the building.

Under the Professional Society of Academics (PSA):

1. The Locus of Licensure Shifts to the Scholar: The authority to teach, assess student mastery, and grant credit is vested in the individual practitioner, certified through an autonomous, horizontal peer guild (Societas).
2. Accreditation Becomes Transborder and Individual: A governor, a board of regents, or a regional accrediting cartel cannot threaten your license, because they don’t own it. Academic legitimacy is maintained through the Public Practice Record (PPR)—an open, transparent, peer-audited ledger of teaching outcomes and scholarly work—not an opaque corporate inspection every ten years.
3. Sovereignty Replaces Subordination: Academics practice as independent firms of one or in partnership. Through the Direct Contract, scholars offer courses directly to student cohorts in leased storefronts, civic hubs, municipal libraries, and other venues.

When you decouple the profession from the institution, the entire federal accreditation panic becomes irrelevant.

Let the Department of Education rewrite § 602.23(j). Let the ACE lobby spend millions whining in Washington. Let corporate boards of trustees squirm under state audits.

When academics own their own licenses, practice in their own communities, and contract directly with their students, nobody can hold our service and stewardship hostage.

Stop defending the cartel’s moat. It’s time to claim our own professional ground.