The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) is a federal advisory board within the Department of Education that “provides recommendations regarding accrediting agencies that monitor the academic quality of postsecondary institutions and educational programs for federal purposes.”

The ABA’s approval by this committee is up for renewal later this summer. The process that is normally a rubber stamp could now be scrutinized by the Trump administration’s more aggressive approach to returning integrity to higher education. Speaking at a Defending Education roundtable on the Hill Thursday, Sarah Parshall Perry, the group’s vice president, said she believes this year’s federal approval process is “going to be different” for the ABA.

Defending Education President Nicole Neily described accreditation as the “velvet glove around the iron fist” because of its often overlooked power in “shaping and twisting” education in America. One of the most egregious offenders is the ABA. The ABA is the only federally recognized accreditor for almost all of the country’s nearly 200 law schools. That means it controls access to federal student loans, bar eligibility, and other career opportunities for students. This gives it enormous power over the entire legal profession.

Over many years, the group implemented a massive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime across America’s law schools. In 2024, its Standard 206 mandated tighter affirmative action in law school hiring, and the post-George Floyd riots Standard 303(c) required all accredited law schools to teach “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the beginning of law school and prior to graduation.

The ABA paused Standard 206 and announced it is considering repealing Standard 303(c), but only after the Trump administration threatened the race-hustling regime ABA has embedded in the legal profession for decades. Given the ABA’s clear left-wing priorities, these incomplete moves seem to be an attempt to avoid penalties for enforcing institutional racism until Democrats control the federal government again.

According to Defending Education, 72 DEI offices remain or have simply rebranded on law school campuses, while 62 law schools still require Standard 303(c) coursework. Parshall Perry stated, “Play-acting at law school accreditation and ethics while jamming liberal orthodoxy down the throats of the nation — [the ABA] voted to officially eliminate its unconstitutional DEI rule for law schools (standard 206). Approval may take until 2027 – so I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Eighty percent of amicus briefs the ABA submits to federal courts bolster left-wing causes, Parshall Perry said. She noted the ABA took the anti-gun position in D.C. v. Heller, the pro-child mutilation position in United States v. Skrmetti, the pro-abortion position in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the pro-racial gerrymandering position in Louisiana v. Callais. The Supreme Court ruled all of the ABA’s positions on these matters unconstitutional, she noted.

One University of Virginia law school graduate on the panel, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid public statements being associated with her judge or chambers while working as a federal judicial law clerk, said the ABA’s far-left requirements are amplified through the broader left-wing law school culture.

“The issue isn’t just that the ABA is the gatekeeper here, it’s the kind of culture the ABA’s requirements push schools to entrench,” she said. “We’re training lawyers in an environment that I think too often encourages moral sorting rather than critical inquiry. Students learn to ask whether an idea is associated with the right people before asking whether it’s true. They learn to categorize arguments before they analyze them.”

America’s law schools cannot survive the ABA’s attempt to fool the Department of Education. The only path to save legal education in America is to strip the organization of its power to accredit, and stand up fresh accreditation institutions committed to the rule of law and constitutional jurisprudence.

“You can’t win a war that you don’t acknowledge exists, and a war is being waged against Western civilization,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said at the meeting. “They’re trying to use the universities, and importantly, our law schools to indoctrinate the next generation of leaders, so that they’ll take away Western civilization.”

Roy backed an effort by Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., to open law school accreditation to more organizations: “There shouldn’t be these left-captured monopolies that get to decide what we believe and what we do,” Fine said at the roundtable.

Fine noted only 11 percent of lawyers are members of the ABA, yet the organization wields outsized power to push leftism on America’s law schools. He said the way Florida dealt with similar extremism among teachers’ unions was to require at least 51 percent of a workplace to be members for a union to operate.

Some states have parted ways with the ABA, including Florida and Texas, while Tennessee and Ohio are moving in a similar direction. Still, federal recognition of the ABA as the only group with the authority to accredit law schools — an “accreditation cartel,” Parshall Perry called it — remains an issue.

When asked about “staffing the ABA orientation bias training. I found myself weighing my answer more carefully than I should have. … Students and faculty alike were highly attuned to institutional signals. You learned which ideas could be expressed confidently, which required disclaimers, and which were better left unsaid,” the UVA graduate explained. “Repeatedly, and up through graduation, I spoke with people so many times who were so willing to voice concerns privately, but not publicly, because of blowback. And because law school was not only educational, but also professional, those signals matter.”

At UVA, law students are automatically enrolled in the ABA, and must actively opt out if they wish. Edward Goul, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, said he had to sit through mandatory DEI courses “addressing racial bias and applying an equity lens to our courses.”

“From the very beginning, they’ve sent a message that there’s a correct set of premises and ideas that are okay in law schools, and questioning them isn’t really an option,” Goul said, adding that while some of the most egregious racial requirements have been scaled back, the environment they created has remained.

Goul and the UVA student pointed to different outgrowths of such an environment, which include some students being afraid to be seen in the same room as a meeting of the campus Federalist Society, a non-leftist lawyers association. They also talked about “blind grading,” in which assignments are graded without the grader knowing the student’s identity. If a student makes anything resembling a textualist legal argument, they are marked down, rendering the entire “blind grading” framework useless.