American Psychological Association Pushes Bias on College Campuses

Professional associations drive progressive bias into college classrooms, and this needs to stop. Accreditation is not just a tiresome administrative routine. It’s a seal of approval that drives access to student loans, official diplomas, and occupational licenses. The Trump administration’s work to reform accreditation should give lawmakers new energy to challenge progressive orthodoxy. 

Start with the American Psychological Association. The APA is the professional organization representing clinicians and educators in the field. Yet it also accredits university psychology departments. Most states require psychologists to have a degree from an accredited program. 

The APA’s accreditation standards push diversity, equity, and inclusion into the classroom. In 2025, the Trump administration began putting accreditors under pressure to stop abusing their power, and the APA announced it was suspending the worst of its DEI standards. But while the organization froze the use of racial preferences in admissions, it kept the rest. 

Even worse, specialist divisions within the APA are still pushing DEI in the form of racial preferences and even antisemitism. For example, the president of Division 39, the APA section representing psychoanalysis and psychologists, graduate students, and allied mental health professionals, openly advocates for intersectionality, a Marxist theory of victimhood that underpins DEI. 

In their 2027 Spring meeting announcement, Division 39 officials quoted Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist active in the mid-20th century. Fanon wrote widely in support of violent methods to force social change. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon wrote, “Use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.” Division 39’s call for research proposals at the conference suggests presenters consider topics such as white supremacy, proximity to whiteness, critical race theory, power, structural violence, and more. 

This event and call for proposals represent the kind of radical progressive bias that university psychology departments often replicate. For example, Yale’s psychology department has a Committee on Racial Equity and Justice. Its website features a long “anti-racist” screed dating to the 2020 race riots. 

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The advocacy group Do No Harm, which exposes identity politics in medicine, recently reminded the APA that the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce has warned the association about racial bias within its ranks. Last December, Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., wrote that his committee “is gravely concerned about antisemitism at the APA” because “Jewish APA members have reported being harassed and ostracized by their colleagues within the APA and at APA events because of their Jewish identity.” 

Walberg’s letter notes that APA’s divisions, such as Division 39, are supposed to follow APA guidelines—like the suspension of DEI in accreditation standards. But Walberg said the requirements “have not been consistently followed.” The chairman quoted remarks from an APA division president who said, “Zionism is a mental illness,” wanted to “destroy Zionism,” and called Israelis “genocidal f—-.” 

Such bigotry has no place in higher education—or anywhere else. Yet these sentiments are common in academia, and accreditors steer university programs to emphasize such distasteful activism.  

At the state level, lawmakers should prohibit colleges from following any DEI standard that conflicts with state laws banning DEI. They also should require universities to change accreditors frequently to spur competition on quality. Florida and North Carolina have already adopted these policies.  

The problem in several fields, though, is that the program-based accreditors have a monopoly. Clinical psychologists need the APA. Lawyers in most states need the American Bar Association. State laws and regulations must change to break these monopolies. 

Competition at the institution level is starting to build. University systems in several states have created a new accreditor. The U.S. Department of Education has been streamlining the approval process to let more accreditors compete. The Trump administration’s anti-DEI executive orders and cancellation of grants with DEI are working. And some colleges are already switching accreditors. 

Some accreditors have suspended DEI standards for now, but they may just be waiting for the next left-of-center administration to reintroduce them. Meanwhile, their divisions are still embracing prejudice while exerting considerable influence on colleges.  

This pressure limits the range of ideas discussed in the classroom and keeps college campuses in a cycle of ideological conformity. Progressive associations are also flouting civil rights laws. Policymakers have solutions that would protect the pursuit of truth and equality under the law—and citing the APA as a bad example is a place to start.