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AHA Announcements, Action Alerts, Advocacy & Public Policy, Federal Government, History Education

Submit Comments on Proposed Accreditation Regulations

The Department of Education has proposed an overhaul of the accreditation system for higher education in the Federal Register: Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization: The Secretary’s Recognition of Accrediting Agencies. The American Historical Association submitted a public comment opposing these changes. Now, we need historians across the country to make their voices heard.

The proposed rule would:

  • Greatly weaken protections for the scholarly standards and practices that sustain the historical discipline, threatening the quality and integrity of both history instruction and scholarship at many types of institutions
  • Narrow the definition of educational quality by emphasizing economic returns and short-term employment outcomes
  • Invite accrediting agencies to overrule evidence, disciplinary standards, and scholarly judgment in favor of supposed ideological diversity
  • Encourage cost-based approaches to faculty and program evaluation that do not adequately account for the educational and scholarly functions of departments, including those in history and related fields

Take Action by September 21, 2026

Please submit your own public comment to the Department of Education by September 21, 2026. We suggest taking the following steps:

  1. Read the AHA’s public comment and/or our key concerns (posted below under Why This Matters).
  2. Draft a comment. It doesn’t have to be long—even a brief comment can make a difference!
  3. Follow the guidelines shared in the AHA’s Responding to Federal Regulations.
  4. Submit your comment through regulations.gov.

Why This Matters

Our key concerns include the following:

  1. The Proposed Regulation Conflates Two Distinct Concepts: Intellectual Diversity and Ideological Diversity. Accreditation must not become a mechanism for determining whether the faculty or curriculum of a history department contains a particular distribution of political or ideological viewpoints. Institutions should not be required to present competing interpretations as equally supported when the weight of historical evidence does not bear such equivalence.
  2. Employment and Earnings Data Are Not Interchangeable with Measures of Educational Quality. History is a disciplinary field with graduates who enter a wide range of occupations rather than a single identifiable labor market. A measure that associates a history degree’s success primarily with the earnings of graduates in a narrow set of occupations would fail to capture the actual educational and occupational uses of historical training.
  3. Faculty Value to an Institution Cannot Be Assessed Solely by Enrollment in Individual Courses. History departments are made up of instructors with specialized knowledge of particular historical periods, regions, languages, methodologies, and bodies of primary evidence. The range of expertise necessary to provide a meaningful historical education may not correspond neatly to student demand in any single semester or academic year. Such expertise is nevertheless essential to a department’s overall curriculum, research capacity, and ability to train students in specialized fields and prepare them for a variety of careers.
  4. Cost-Benefit Analysis Should Not Be Used as a Standalone Basis for Determining Whether an Academic Discipline or Program Provides Sufficient Educational Value. A university is composed of academic departments that collectively provide the educational, scholarly, and institutional resources through which the university fulfills its mission. Beyond rigorous undergraduate education in historical methods, history departments contribute to general education, teacher preparation, interdisciplinary study, graduate education, public programming, archival and library use, and the preparation of students for a broad range of careers. A program should not be judged “inefficient” merely because the benefits it provides cannot be reduced to direct revenue, enrollment, or earnings measures.

The AHA urges the Department of Education not to finalize the accreditation rule in its current form. Accreditation should protect academic freedom without requiring political or ideological balancing; it should measure intellectual diversity without substituting political categories for disciplinary judgment; consider employment and earnings without treating economic outcomes as proxies for educational value; promote responsible staffing that values faculty expertise; and encourage cost-conscious decision-making without reducing the value of academic programs to their direct financial returns. We hope that members will join us in speaking up about the ramifications if this proposed rule is adopted.

Deadline: September 21, 2026

Make Your Voice Heard!