The Damage Done by Accreditors

The Restless Christmas Gift

It was just five days before Christmas when the faculty called me in for a special meeting. A meeting that would change my life.

After five months of overcoming technical challenges my younger classmates handled with ease, feeling out of step with their focus on Harry Styles love life, and struggle sessions intended to pressure me to apologize for my uncomplicated gender, heterosexuality, and white skin, I was told that my three A’s and my B+ was not enough for me to be considered ready for practicum.

I was also expected to internalize the program’s interpretation of the values of commitment, humility, openness, respect, integrity, and self-awareness. Where I thought of these principles as perseverance through hard times, holding off on snap judgments (since nobody knows everything), and recognizing I’m useless on 10 cups of coffee and a stick of stale licorice.

Apparently, that’s not what they meant.

The University of Tennessee’s counseling master’s program meant something very different by those terms.

It was in the months after I left this program that I began to fully comprehend what the faculty expected. What I had taken for overly progressive framed lessons and confusing encounters, for example, when my classmates all identified racist white men as their nightmare clients, while I was more concerned about narcissists and psychopaths, and my professor chided me that all psychopaths need is love.

Now I know their interpretation for those values is founded in the belief of an identity-based, oppressor/oppressed worldview. The faculty framed that as fighting injustice, but in practice, I learned it meant that if I weren’t constantly aware of and apologizing for my whiteness and general lack of LGBTQ proclivities, as far as the faculty was concerned, I would be a danger to clients.

I can see why my classmates remained aloof when I tearfully shared that I missed my kids, and why others blew up when I mentioned going by the old Woolworth’s in Greensboro. Sorrow for missing precious moments with family wasn’t important, but being a white woman and visiting the shrine of the first sit-in was catastrophic. How dare I? And how dare I mention such an act of white supremacy to a black woman?

Though the privileged/marginalized framework ideas were touched on briefly in ethics class, I didn’t pick up on the requirement that we must adopt these ideas whole cloth. The encouragement during orientation, to think of this program as a brave space where we could freely share our thoughts, rang too loudly and too long in my ears. That and the assumption that the First Amendment still applied on campus.

Though I knew beforehand that psychology-based professional circles leaned progressive, I could not wrap my head around the idea that a therapist training program would be instructing students to look at the world in a racist and bigoted way. In my view, such a dogma was an anathema to creating the conditions that would make good therapy possible. I simply couldn’t believe they were serious. So whenever there seemed to be a surprisingly negative response to my comments, I thought I wasn’t making myself clear.

It wasn’t until much later, when I did an in-depth study of the textbooks used for the dreaded Multicultural Counseling Class I would have taken the following semester, that I realized just how diabolical the ideology and indoctrination program really is. Or how this is all orchestrated through accreditation.

I left that Christmas meeting in shock. The faculty member who made the call to bar me from moving forward seemed gleeful during the meeting and went on to predict that I would have a restless holiday break. I left for home, kicking myself for not following my instinct to record the conversation, and fluctuating between crying, driving numbly, trying to understand what I had done wrong, and what just happened.

During the meeting, the opportunity to continue with the program was offered up like a booby prize. With the holiday break underway, the window for me to make a decision was short, and the offices of ombudsmen and other potentially helpful parties were closed. As I struggled to chart the road ahead, I dismissed the idea of paying another penny for a program that left me feeling both confused and vilified. Even if I had stayed in the program, that track would progress at a much slower pace, requiring at least an additional year and perhaps more before I would be allowed to finish. Basically, it would last however long it took for me to diminish my whiteness.

So I left the program.

The author

Fallout

The next few weeks were a painful time complicated by fallout from a messy divorce. I had gone back to grad school because I knew I needed to get back in the workforce as soon as possible. I had chosen the UTK program not only because it was close, but also because it has a shortened timeline of just two and a half years to complete, and connections in the local environment. I thought I could make a quick transition to getting back to work and helping my community.

That was important because after homeschooling all four of my kids, only to be pulled up short by a divorce, I was scared, not just for my future, but for how I would be able to support my children and be the springboard to adulthood they needed to start their own lives. There was a limited window before my health insurance terminated, and a short span of support before the financial walls would begin closing in around me.

Officially off the path toward therapist licensure, and with my four kids and myself cramped in a three-bedroom house, I did not know what I was going to do now.

In the weeks that followed, I cried. I second-guessed myself. I filed a discrimination complaint with the UTK diversity office, and I started watching videos on everything described as woke.

Back when I was still in class, I remember feeling like I should probably hide the fact that I was watching videos of Jonathan Haidt. Now, away from that environment, I was compelled to understand why I felt that way, and to learn how a well-respected training program at a large state university could become what I could only truthfully describe as a totalitarian indoctrination vehicle.

In this way, I slowly began to put myself and my life back together

In the months that followed, I was racked by waves of shame, sadness, and fear. I spent hours flipping over a dynamic sand art toy that made mountains out of flowing sand and water, slipping past each other, a thin sandwich between two panes of glass.

I also started to dig. And I found that this wasn’t just one rogue program; this was the flagship example of accreditor design.

The Accreditation Racket

When I had been shopping for a counselor training program, the name CACREP kept popping up. I learned it was an accreditation body for higher education programs in the field, and if your degree was from a CACREP-accredited school, you’d have an easier time getting your license.

Your training program would also have measures in place to make sure you’d succeed, and you could get the Tricare credential and work with military clients.

Having grown up by Ft Bragg, and with past volunteering for Team Red White and Blue, a group focused on veteran mental health, I’d imagined my future led in that direction.

The UTK program is CACREP-accredited. But when I thought about my experience there being akin to getting stuck on the spin cycle of a frontloader Whirlpool I knew something was deeply wrong at the accreditation level.

I filed a complaint with CACREP.

Like the complaint I’d filed with the UTK diversity office, it was dismissed. And where the UTK diversity office failed to follow their own rules, something I was able to document through a series of e-mails, CACREP provided little explanation. As I continued to dig, I learned that they had no incentive to. Accreditation doesn’t function in students’ best interest.

Like most Americans, I thought that accreditation was an agency of consumer protection. If you only remember one thing from my story, please remember this.

Accreditation does not verify that a school provides quality education. In a conflict of interest, the school pays for the accreditation stamp of approval. And accreditors have learned they can use their power to dictate the ideas students are taught down to the ideological level. There is no easy way to stop them. If you are asking me, accreditation is a parasitic institution.

Part of the reason college tuition has been skyrocketing is the result of accreditation fees. Universities must be accredited for students to be eligible for Pell Grants and other federal monies. Being accredited is a make-or-break proposition for any college that wants to keep its doors open. That means doing what it takes to keep accreditors happy, paying their fees, and adding administrative staff to keep up with their demands.

In the case of counseling, CACREP accreditation requires training programs to be infused with diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma, and under the guise of “Professional dispositions,” it directs training faculty to evaluate students’ beliefs, values, and commitments with gatekeeping applied accordingly. This same lens is required by professional organizations in their codes of ethics and is increasingly tied to licensure.

These groups would argue that cultural competence is essential to protecting clients. But what the multicultural counseling textbooks teach is that culture is defined by skin color. Those tagged as marginalized are coded as incompetent, unable to succeed without those labeled privileged hobbling themselves, and sadistic enjoyment in this reversal of presumed fortunes is par for the course.

Cultural awareness might matter if we are defining it as something other than skin deep, but mandating constant self-flagellation over immutable traits turns therapy into activism, with some textbooks explicitly calling for such. Naturally, this erodes trust for everyone.

The more I learned, the more I began to reach out. I wanted my money back from that fraudulent education, and I didn’t want young adults like my classmates and other kids to waste their time and money in programs like the one I’d just walked away from. As I read ahead in the required counseling curriculum, the more I could see this worldview leading to malpractice in the field.

Refusing to Be Silenced

I reached out to FIRE and then to FAIR. While I hoped for legal support, with limited non-profit resources and a very narrow time window to pursue legal action, without a recording of my last meeting, there wasn’t quite enough of a paper trail to be a slam dunk.

Writing became my outlet.

Minding the Campus published my first deep dive into the history of counseling accreditor, CACREP. That article was shared widely, encouraging me to keep going. I started a Substack, Diogenes In Exile. And others in the therapy world reached out.

That is when I learned that other people across the country share my story. Many therapists in training have been through what I have been through or worse. Left with mountains of debt, and in need of therapy, but lacking the trust in the profession to be willing to seek it out.

Podcasts reached out, and I shared my story there, but I also shared what I learned about how the system works and what it will take to change it.

The more old documents I found, the more I realized that my program at UTK wasn’t an exception; it was working exactly as designed. And the only thing that will curtail the accreditor overreach that is fueling this perversion of care is new laws that demand accountability and enforce penalties when students’ basic rights are being violated.

After delving deeply into policy, I found my way to the National Association of Scholars, where I now work as their External Affairs Coordinator. Working with legislators and policy experts, I am pushing for change that would see a return of Free Speech to campus.