When you run such a bad school you can't earn accreditation

The obvious thing to do is change the rules.

Thers of Whiskey Fire:

Last month the Dept of Education issued a proposal to strengthen its hold over college accreditation bodies -- broadly speaking, the organizations that set the standards for public and private colleges and universities. Inside Higher Ed sums up the proposals:

The draft language, which will be considered next week by a federal panel weighing possible changes in federal rules governing higher education accreditation, would give accreditors three options for measuring institutions’ success in educating students — two of which force them to set minimal levels of acceptable performance, which accreditors (and many college officials) have traditionally considered it inappropriate for them to do.

The department’s proposals would also require accrediting agencies to bar the colleges they monitor from basing decisions about whether to accept a transfer student’s academic credits on the accreditation status of the “sending” institution, and significantly increase the amount and types of information that accrediting groups would have to make public.

There's a lot to discuss in that first paragraph. But here let's highlight the second part: "The department’s proposals would also require accrediting agencies to bar the colleges they monitor from basing decisions about whether to accept a transfer student’s academic credits on the accreditation status of the 'sending' institution."

It's an arcane-sounding point, but what it really is, is a big giveaway to schools like The King's College, which I discuss here. Religious wingnutty schools like that have trouble getting accreditation from one of the regional bodies, which leads to trouble when students want to transfer their credits to schools that are accredited in the usual way.

These people don't miss a trick. The overall goal is to create a parallel ideological universe, a nation with a nation, one with its own rules and even laws.

When you don't like the truth, challenge the facts. When your faith is threatened by science, disparage science. When you want a theocracy, flood the judicial system with your minions.

From the Carpetbagger Report:

Thanks to the prosecutor purge scandal, and former Alberto Gonzales aide Monica Goodling’s role in it, the public is learning about Robertson’s Regent University, which, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted over the weekend, is doing exactly what it set out to do.

Goodling is only one of 150 graduates of Regent University currently serving in this administration, as Regent’s Web site proclaims proudly, a huge number for a 29-year-old school. Regent estimates that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” And that’s precisely what its founder desired. The school’s motto is “Christian Leadership To Change the World,” and the world seems to be changing apace. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft teaches at Regent, and graduates have achieved senior positions in the Bush administration. The express goal is not only to tear down the wall between church and state in America (a “lie of the left,” according to Robertson) but also to enmesh the two.

The law school’s dean, Jeffrey A. Brauch, urges in his “vision” statement that students reflect upon “the critical role the Christian faith should play in our legal system.” Jason Eige (’99), senior assistant to Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, puts it pithily in the alumni newsletter, Regent Remark: “Your Resume Is God’s Instrument.”

As Christopher Hayes explained in The American Prospect, more than two-thirds of Regent students identified themselves as Republicans, but the numbers aren’t as important as the school’s mission. As Hayes noted, “what students are taught at a place like Regent, or even Calvin and Wheaton, is to live out a Christ-centered existence in all facets of their lives. But what they learn is to become Republicans.”

Slate’s Lithwick suggests the more significant problem here is that these Regent grads left Robertson’s confines confused: “Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God’s work with the president’s.” I think there’s some truth to that — Regent grads may be convinced that Bush is somehow God’s messenger on earth — but I suspect the problem is more practical than that.

Thanks to Robertson’s minions infiltrating Bush’s Justice Department, religious right activists are literally helping drive federal law enforcement, particularly when it comes to civil rights and picking U.S. Attorneys.

The Bush administration really does believe it can change reality.
Just to remind you, a quote from a senior adviser to Bush in 2002:

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.