‘No Accountability, No Justice, and No Integrity’

For years, the American Psychological Association has had a problem it has been unable or unwilling to address, summed up by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) as a “persistent and pernicious pattern of antisemitism.”

Now, a bipartisan federal advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Education decided to do something about it. Late last month it recommended, in a 7 to 4 vote, that the federal government suspend its recognition of the APA’s accrediting arm, its Commission on Accreditation (APA-CoA).

The current accreditor of 1,320 professional education and training programs at the master’s, doctoral, doctoral internship, and postdoctoral residency level in psychology, the APA-CoA has an important hand shaping the standards and best practices of trainees at a time when the standing of higher education has drawn widespread skepticism.