The Commission on Accreditation (CoA) of the American Psychological Association (APA) released a memo a few weeks ago to inform clinical psychology programs of their decision “to immediately and temporarily suspend evaluation of programs for compliance with several specific accreditation standards. The suspended standards are those related to faculty and student program actions in the areas of diversity in recruitment, admission/selection, and/or retention efforts.”
For some background: The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has tasked the APA with the national accreditation of master’s degrees, doctoral degrees, doctoral internships, and postdoctoral residencies on standards selected by the APA. For this purpose, the APA has formed the Commission on Accreditation, an independent body within the APA, tasked with ensuring all clinical departments in universities that offer various degrees in psychology at all post-baccalaureate levels perform at or above the APA-selected standards. The accreditation process for a single program goes on for years. In my own experience, from the first day of admission to the last few weeks before my doctoral graduation—five years almost to the day—the APA accreditation was seemingly the only theme worth discussing. This is only a slight exaggeration, but nevertheless an exaggeration that aims to succinctly describe just how consuming the accreditation process can be for a program. It becomes, effectively, the only guiding light for every decision made, every faculty hired, every student admitted, every research paper published, every class crafted—including every disciplinary process. Under these conditions, the outcome becomes the same as at other levels of education. We have heard and read over the last twenty years how the K-12 curriculum devolves into a teaching-to-the-test paradigm, rather than teaching to learn. Well, with the APA accreditation, the paradigm is no different: Everything is performed to meet the accreditation standards rather than to impart the highest level of education at the highest peak of the clinical profession.
Yet, the stronghold of accreditation standards has always been problematic—yes, I know. The proper argument is that degrees that directly affect the public should be duly legitimized. The strength of legitimate standards of excellence notwithstanding, the problem is the same as everywhere else in a country’s social-cultural-economic life: Monopoly. Therefore, just as in the economic arena, a monopoly exercises all the power over all the programs and opportunities and creates, ironically, not the diversity it supposedly promotes but a glaring sameness.
The push for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in education, which surged over the past five years but began much earlier, has paused. The Commission on Accreditation (CoA) announced a temporary suspension of standards related to diversity in recruitment, selection, and retention efforts. This decision, made in March, follows the January 21, 2025, executive order, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
This move raises two key questions: one practical, one substantive. Practically, why did the CoA act after the January executive order rather than the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 29, 2023, ruling that struck down affirmative action? Wouldn’t aligning with the Court’s decision have better upheld the rule of law, free from political influence? Substantively, how does the APA reconcile the diversity it claims to champion with the uniformity it imposes across clinical psychology programs, as universities chase its accreditation for their websites, faculty résumés, and students’ credentials?
The first universities were founded and flourished in the Middle Ages—the University of Paris was the most illustrious, though it does not exist today in its original form. Others do: University of Bologna (ca. 1088) and University of Oxford (ca. 1096), the world’s first and second oldest universities in continual operation. These universities did not need accreditations, other than the initial granting of a charter by the relevant authority for the nascent institution as a whole. The proliferation of universities in the Middle Ages—unfortunately, contributing to today’s presentist insistence of labeling them “Euro-centric”—suggests that in the realm of education, just as in the free-market economy, the freedom to expand, build, and offer education, creating healthy competitiveness, offers the best intellectual conditions for learning and advancement. If only the CoA understood that diversity, as they promote it, is actually sameness. And the irony does not end there. The grip on academia—the long march through the institutions—would not exist either historically or as we witness it presently without the Christian-Western intellectual tradition that built unmatched cathedrals, founded universities, and provided the metaphysical foundations on which the scientific method would eventually flourish. If we are supposed to “trust the science,” we should also appreciate how the science got its origins: free inquiry and free exchange of ideas.
APA and psychology programs should return to psychology and stop venturing into areas in which they do not hold any competencies. Psychologists of all stripes should be psychologists and not ideologues with progressive opinions on matters that do not pertain to their education. They are not historians, military historians, economists, political scientists, or philosophers. They are not geographers or demographers, and they should stop focusing on ethnic identities invented by the U.S. Government. There is no theory to date that satisfactorily bridges the issues of the individual with those of a whole nation or whole groups of nations, ethnicities, and geographic-historical origins. Mistaking, even replacing, the individual for the collective in APA’s sweeping statements smacks too much of Stalinism and worse.
Let’s return to education that instructs and upholds, that does not indoctrinate, and that lets intellectual diversity be an inspiration, and not a threat. Let’s do it by strengthening academic excellence and eliminating bureaucracies and gatekeepers. Then we let individuals thrive in ways that bureaucracies cannot even fathom.
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Image: “The American Psychological Association headquarters in Washington, D.C” by Harrison Keely on Wikimedia Commons
