The American Bar Association is on the precipice of losing its power to accredit law schools as a federal panel weighs whether to recommend the punitive measure to the Education Department.
The vote was scheduled for Wednesday, but the deadlocked panel — known as the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity — delayed its decision until Thursday. It was unclear how the panel would resolve its differences.
The panel’s longtime members and staff said they could not recall when the group had failed to reach a majority decision on a recommendation. The panel’s 18 members are appointed by the secretary of education, the Senate president and the House speaker, with several appointees recommended by minority party lawmakers.
“Hopefully we can find a creative solution,” said Jay P. Greene, the chairman of the advisory panel and research director at Do No Harm, a group that campaigns against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and youth gender-affirming care in medicine.
Officials from the bar association’s accreditation agency, known as the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, declined to comment after the meeting.
A report earlier this month by staff of the Education Department urged the panel to recommend stripping the accreditation role from the bar association, the nation’s largest organization of lawyers. Such a move would strike a blow to a group that has battled the Trump administration over its attacks on law firms and also open a front in the administration’s pressure campaign on higher education.
The panel’s recommendation would be sent to Nicholas Kent, the No. 2 official at the Education Department, who has been a key enforcer of the administration’s bid to reshape academia. Mr. Kent would have 90 days to decide whether to oust the bar association from its perch as the nation’s gatekeeper of legal education, which it has held for the past five decades.
If the bar association loses its vetting powers, law schools would have to cobble together different forms of accreditation. Accreditation is required under federal law for students to have access to billions in federal aid, including work-study programs and student loans available to law students.
Law schools attached to universities could rely on their school’s institutional accrediting body. Education Department officials said about a half-dozen stand-alone, independent law schools do not have accreditation from regional bodies, but expected those schools to find other accreditation.
The bigger blow appeared to be aimed at the bar association. Founded in Chicago nearly 150 years ago, the group has been fighting with the federal government since last year, when it sued to stop the Trump administration from punishing law firms it did not like.
The bar association, which has locked horns with the Education Department and the advisory panel multiple times in the past 20 years, tried to curry favor with the Trump administration earlier this month by repealing its diversity requirement for law schools. The bar association, which oversees about 200 juris doctorate programs in the country, said the requirement was a risk to its accreditation role.
But whether that concession would be enough to save its accreditation powers remained unclear. Bar association officials on Wednesday maintained that they were in compliance with federal regulations.
“We think we have the right focus,” said Daniel Thies, who until recently was the chair of the bar association’s accreditation agency. “We are focused on our students. We are focused on the legal system. We’re focused on making sure lawyers are qualified.”
Half of the panel was in favor of extending time to the bar association on compliance issues.
“I’m really struggling to see what the big harm is right now to students from the American Bar Association,” said Zakiya Smith Ellis, a former New Jersey secretary of education, who supported giving more time to the bar association.
But other members of the advisory panel said they were uncomfortable with what they viewed as too cozy of a relationship between the bar association’s accreditation body and the association itself.
Arthur Keiser, an advisory panel member who manages the operations of about two dozen Keiser University campuses in Florida and abroad, said the association’s accreditation body had a history of noncompliance with federal standards. He supported stripping the group’s power.
“They have been out of compliance for a long time,” Mr. Keiser said. “I don’t feel sorry for them.”
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