History: American -- University Accreditation

Gary North

Universities are the most consistently politically liberal and atheistic of all institutions in the United States.

How do they maintain their power? How do they resist change? How do their leaders force all colleges to submit to their rule?

They have given a grant of power by the accreditation agencies, which in turn are licensed by the United States government. In economic terms, this is an oligopoly: a restricted market of sellers.

How did this come about?

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

There is no documented book on the history of accreditation. It is a well-kept secret.

Higher education in the United States costs, as of 2007, in the range of a third of a trillion dollars a year. Most of this is paid for by taxes. Yet the voters and legislators have never been told the story of how an ideologically liberal professorial elite gained oligopolistic control over America's college students.

Tax-funded schools are the legal equivalent of tax-supported churches. How did an elite of widely atheistic professors gain control over the institutions that indoctrinate the children of parents who are not atheists?

We do not know how an elite that certifies and screens access into its ranks gained nearly complete control over higher education. We do not know who the original organizers were who gained such a grant of privilege from the U.S. government.

We do not know how the elite gained the exclusive right to use the words "college" and "university," when no other businesses or charitable organizations are allowed to do this.

We do not know who put up the original money to obtain what is the most powerful single tool of thought control in America: academic accreditation.

WHERE TO BEGIN

I would start with the organization created and funded by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., in 1903: the General Education Board. Through the GEB, Rockefeller persuaded colleges, which were completely independent, to hire young men with the Ph.D. degree.

Next, study the history of the accreditation of medical schools. This, too, was a Rockefeller operation. The key figure here was Abraham Flexner. He was not a physician. His older brother was a medical researcher with the Rockefeller Foundation. Abraham was with the GEB, 1912-25.

The Ph.D. was the first purely secular academic degree. It was imported from Germany. It was granted only by universities. These universities used this degree to produce university professors who were not pastors, which most college instructors were in 1875. Johns Hopkins University was a pioneer here. Woodrow Wilson was one of its first products of the Ph.D. program. Begin researching this topic with the book by George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Non-Belief (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Search terms: AGhistory, AGeducation.