The French have an education ministry; the English put their faculty in charge. In America, the Tenth Amendment makes it clear that education is not one of the powers specifically delegated to the federal government. As a consequence, colleges and universities are run by lay boards of trustees secured from federal interference, thanks to Daniel Webster’s 1819 suit before the Supreme Court. Various protocols such as academic freedom protect this independence, and institutions justly defend it. American higher education has thrived because of its institutional autonomy.
Free from government intrusion, academic institutions in the United States developed a nongovernmental system of peer evaluation. In true Tocquevillian spirit, voluntary educational associations arose in the late nineteenth century to differentiate colleges from high schools—that is, true “higher” education from secondary education. Over the years, these bodies developed criteria to identify the characteristics
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