Closing the Books on the Spellings Commission

You might miss it. Tucked into then end of Paul Basken’s story in the Chronicle of February 1, 2008 is an acknowledgment by Charles Miller, Chair of the Spellings Commission, that the campaign to make accreditation a federally assisted process for extracting greater accountability from the nation’s colleges and universities has come to an end. By all accounts, the renewal of the Higher Education Act will use Senate language “giving colleges the authority to set the terms of their own academic evaluations.” To be sure, Miller was not happy with this outcome, suggesting that the fight to impose tougher standards will now be waged in state capitals. “The governors are going to wake up one day,” Basken reports Miller as saying, “and say, ‘What are these people in Atlanta and Chicago and those places doing telling me what my institution should do? We own them.’” But the time, energy, and political capital invested in and by the Spellings Commission is now exhausted. We all have a right to ask, “To what end?”