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Sunday, July 09, 2023

Florida [DeSantis and crowd] is suing the Department of Education over percieved accreditation injustices. They have a case number so they have already filed.

 Reporting. Complaint online.

The relief sought is to enjoin DOE grants and loans being for accredited institutions only, with the complaint claiming that law set up that way is an unconstitutional delegation of Congressional power to private parties, accreditation bodies, with current statutory law requiring that DOE grant and lend under that constraint.

If accreditation is absent, it will be a wild west clown show (to yet again mix metaphors).

If State level accreditation is won, things will be politicized, as - for example - DeSantis and henchpersons have biases about education voiced already K-12. Where they can poison wells and berate Disney.

 Their having reach to exercise such biases in Florida higher education, unrestrained, is interesting to contemplate.

Objectivity in the hands of capable well motivated professionals is needed for decent nationwide consistency and the existing system has merit. 

Consider the Fed. Bankers self-regulating. If there is a place where fiscal abuse is possible and a worry, it is bankers self-regulating. The idea being it is better they do so, than the Treasury Department, which can be more politicized, and far less skilled. The threat to economic good order, by bad or fraudulent banking, is thought by lawmakers to be less per having the Fed, rather than not having nationwide consistent bank regulation by learned and skilled professionals. As things are. Like it or love it.

If money and banking, federal issues, deserve professional handling, higher education, a federal issue because of nationwide job mobility, a matter of interstate commerce, deserves the same.

The Florida litigation really does not propose a credible alternative, it just complains because DeSantis can. His people had the filing fee and filed. It is now pending.

There can be laxity. Marcus Bachmann, Michel's spouse, has a thriving Christian counseling business accused of conversion therapy which Bachmann denies, but the man has a non-resident PhD to counsel, from an institution somehow accredited, by some operation allowed to accredit Marcus with his Thesis being impossible to find online to judge per normal web search.

How exactly that happened is moot, given that State regulators license the Bachmann clinic efforts, accepting the accredited degree; but, imagine if there were no accreditation. Ivy League and land grant major universities are known, but other excellent accredited campusus might have a harder time differentiating themselves from charletans in a no-holds-barred situation where frauds could thrive. (There was Trump University, but leave that dead threat where history and regulators left it.)

Bottom line: The litigation exists, and has yet to attract due public attention and thought. Having not seen reporting of the Florida litigation apart from time-to-time checking of RT, there might be a host or returned web hits if searched, but normal web navigating, per Crabgrass action, had not found the issue reported apart from RT. DeSantis boat rocks because he can, not because there is any shred of wisdom to it. It is part of why the man would be an unmitigated disaster if allowed the Oval Office as his mischief base.

Opinions can differ.