Heads Up: Seven Southern States Team Up To Create Anti-DEI College Accreditor Format To Please Trump

The new accreditor will operate as a nonprofit, headquartered in Florida, and already has a $4 million fund from the Sunshine State’s legislature.

Seven southern states–Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina–are in the midst of developing a new accrediting agency for public colleges and universities to “move away from DEI-driven mandates,” NOLA reports.

In June 2025, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the new accreditor to compete with the “accreditation cartel.” In support, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order forming a task force to explore the parameters of adding an accreditor, offering “an alternative to the out-of-touch accreditation system.” “This task force will ensure Louisiana’s public universities move away from DEI-driven mandates and toward a system rooted in merit-based achievement,” he said of the July 22 statement.

The new accreditor will operate as a nonprofit headquartered in Florida and already has a $4 million fund from the Sunshine State’s legislature. The group’s target date to start accrediting institutions is 2026, while it attempts to obtain approval from the U.S. Education Department by 2028. The orders also target private-sector partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — in states where a majority of HBCUs are located — to create more apprenticeships and strengthen requirements for colleges to report gifts and contracts from foreign governments.

Nonprofit accreditors are recognized by the federal government but operate independently to assess school quality by investigating finances, curriculum, faculty, student achievement, and other relevant factors. An executive order signed by President Donald Trump defined “the accreditors’ job as to determine which institutions provide a quality education — and therefore merit accreditation.”

He pointed the finger at the agencies, claiming they lacked the guarantee of academic quality with standards requiring conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and “improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology.”

Several university and college administrators label the accreditation process as an unnecessary expense that doesn’t significantly improve student life or educational outcomes. Trump’s supporters claim some accreditors abuse efforts to enroll students from diverse backgrounds and guarantee they feel welcomed and supported on campus, as he promised to “fire the radical left accreditors” during his presidential campaign.

John Przypyszny, a Washington D.C.-based attorney specializing in higher education law, believes the accreditation field is getting caught up in the growing DEI and culture wars of America. “When you start looking at accreditation through an ideological lens, it’s just not a healthy dynamic,” Przypyszny said.

While the new accreditor must still be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, which takes approximately two years, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, an association of major accrediting groups, “firmly reject President Trump’s mischaracterization of accreditors’ role” and warn the ideologies of Trump, DeSantis and Landry, could “be escalated to federal court.” “The proper way to change those policies is through negotiated rulemaking that considers voices and insights from the broader public,” President Heather Perfetti said in a statement.