OPINION: NIC win-win

Now that the North Idaho College trustee election is over we can set aside the rhetoric and review the facts. 

At the heart of the NIC accreditation issue was DEI. DEI, alternately known as Social Justice or Woke, had been creeping into the fabric of NIC for two decades. Starting slow but at an accelerating pace, the adoption of DEI policies resulted in falling NIC attendance while administrative costs and bureaucratic overhead soared.  

Agenda driven indoctrination was displacing education and students' freedom of expression was restricted if they engaged in “wrongthink.” Valuable, practical classes and programs were being curtailed in favor of more progressive studies. The changes were slow, so as not to raise alarm, but incessant. Transmuting a community college from a resource where students can acquire marketable skills to an institution of social transformation.  

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a racist, Marxist policy that invariably leads to destruction. Get woke, go broke isn’t just a slogan, it’s a fact. Emphasizing equity, diversity and inclusion over competency and merit is a sure path to failure. Examples abound. Military enlistment rates plummet after DEI adoption. The Bud Light “trans” campaign debacle cost Anheuser-Bush a huge chunk of market share. DEI resulted in Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign being the worst ever. Jaguar is learning the painful lesson that their primary market, middle aged wealthy men are not self-obsessed social justice warriors. These are typical examples of the ruin at the end of the DEI rainbow. 

DEI did not arise spontaneously from the ether. It is an engineered movement cultivated by progressive Marxist elements in institutions of higher education. Columbia, Berkley, Stanford and others are the headwaters for the disciples who graduate and then go on to evangelizing the religion of woke while being funded by foundations created by billionaire progressives like Soros and Gates.  

The Woke Mind Virus infected many institutions, including those responsible for the accreditation of colleges and universities. Accreditation was conceived as a way to ensure students were getting value for their tuition dollars. “Accreditation” meant that an institution’s finances and academic standards met minimum requirements. However, with time those accreditation standards would be morphed into a tool for social revolution.  

One mechanism for this transformation was money, specifically grants. The agency with a monopoly on accreditation in Idaho is the Washington State based Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. NWCCU has an annual budget of about $3.2 million. Over a third of that comes from grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The stated purpose of those grants is to promote DEI, specifically “to build organizational capacity for intermediaries so that they can support multiple colleges and universities to undergo institutional transformation” and “to develop communications about organizations whose expertise and services can support colleges and universities in their efforts to achieve equitable outcomes.” 

On their website, NWCCU pledges its commitment to DEI “Promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and social justice within the organization and among member institutions.” “Member institutions” obviously includes NIC.  

During the run-up to the 2020 elections the progressives pledged that if the conservative candidates Barnes and McKenzie were elected then accreditation would be put at risk. Accreditation had morphed from a set of academic and financial standards into a weapon to be used to enforce progressive policies and social change.  

The accreditation complaint spells it out “if NIC is allowed to continue to defy and ignore the NWCCU essential criteria (DEI) that welcomes, encourages, protects and promotes an inclusive academic institution for the students, employees and the community, this will establish a dangerous precedent and challenge to the NWCCU for its future work with institutions it oversees as to accreditation.” The “future work” referenced is the “institutional transformation” paid for by the Gates Foundation.  

The problem the progressives were having was that DEI is very unpopular so it had to be hidden as the actual agenda. This is why the flurry of protests, lawsuits, disorderly board meetings, pulled fire alarm and general propaganda campaign to gaslight “board governance” as the issue. In a move that would make Saul Alinsky proud the Save-NIC gang generated chaos which they blamed on the board and then demanded trustee resignations. Never once did they ask what they could do to help preserve accreditation.  

This past election the North Idaho “Republicans” (NIR)-Save NIC coalition was narrowly successful in installing three freshman trustees. The win will likely be a Pyrrhic victory as the cost may not be worth the rewards. Here is why. 

North Idaho “Republicans” (NIR)-Save NIC now owns the accreditation problem. Their candidates were promoted as “conservative Republicans” but they must now act as passive bystanders to the president’s progressive agenda to satisfy the NWCCU. They will be a rubber stamp for the return of DEI policies and they will have nobody to blame but themselves. 

The NWCCU has been exposed. It is not an impartial referee for academia, but a political agent with a progressive and unpopular agenda. The incoming Trump administration has already announced that accreditation agency reform is a top priority. NWCCU may find its own accreditation at risk.  

NIR is now guilty of all the sins they accused the Official Republican Party, the KCRCC, of committing. NIR endorsed candidates without vetting, without interviews and without a vote of the membership and with zero transparency. A small group of insiders made all the decisions while the membership went along for the ride.  

The accreditation issue is over, and so is the energy derived from that conflict. 

All considered, this election was a win-win for citizens of Kootenai County and the KCRCC.  

It’s just common sense.

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Brent Regan is chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee.