COLUMN ONE : Getting Grades for Diversity? : USC and Stanford are among schools irate over tough plan to certify colleges. At stake are questions about how culture should be taught and who should judge the teachers.

Open rebellion has broken out at some of California’s most prestigious private universities, but the protesters occupying the administration buildings are not students.

The dissidents are led by such academic luminaries as Stanford President Gerhard Casper--who vows to block the “intrusion” of outside forces into higher education--and the presidents of USC and Caltech.

Their robes have been ruffled by a little-known proposal to hold colleges accountable for fostering cultural diversity on campus--using the secretive quality-control process known as accreditation.

Casper called the plan an affront to academic freedom that could erode the quality of higher education. USC President Steven B. Sample said the proposal is naive and hypocritical. Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart labeled the move politically correct and urged its sponsors to “stick to their knitting.”

Their ire is aimed at a 20-page “statement on diversity” up for a vote today before the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, a private organization that exists to certify the quality of 145 institutions of higher education in California, Hawaii and Guam.

The statement is billed as a guideline to help the schools evaluate their own progress toward making campuses more multicultural. But it also makes clear that schools will be judged on how thoroughly they address diversity in their courses and faculties.

If the statement is adopted, institutions would be obliged to conduct a “thoughtful engagement” with the new guidelines. The statement also suggests that schools extend their curricula beyond traditional Western values, asks schools to pay attention to the ethnic make-up of their student body and reaffirms a 1988 goal to encourage “cultural diversity as an outcome of undergraduate instruction.”

“All that is being required is that institutions be engaged in thoughtful self study about these issues,” said Stephen S. Weiner, executive director of the association’s college accrediting commission. “People see in documents all kinds of things, some of which were intended and some of which were not.”

Weiner said that 90 of the association’s member institutions--including five UC campuses and the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University--favor the diversity statement. Fourteen schools have come out against, he said, all of them private.

Stanford, USC, Pepperdine and Caltech--joined by some lesser-known religious schools--have been lobbying furiously against today’s vote in San Francisco. While they say it is necessary to teach students the virtues of racial harmony and cultural understanding, these academic giants threaten to break ranks over the issue and start their own accrediting body.

Such down-and-dirty brawls are not the norm in the deferential world of academia. Many say it portends what could become a Holy War over what has been a smoldering issue in higher education: Just who should grade the universities?

Elsewhere, accrediting colleges and universities is a government responsibility. But in America, the task of determining whether a school is fit to educate students has developed over a century into a Byzantine system run by obscure associations whose boards are dominated by the very schools they inspect.

Today, nine regional associations accredit two- and four-year institutions across the United States--a jigsaw configuration that even those intimately involved in the system acknowledge is “historical accident.” Accreditation is granted after a school conducts a “self-study” and a small team of outside academics visits a campus and writes a separate critique.

Although reams of paperwork are generated during these reviews, nothing is publicly disclosed except the final decision to grant or withhold accreditation.

Technically, accreditation means a school has met minimum requirements of the peer review panel. Though the stamp of approval may be faint, it can be crucial--especially for lesser-known colleges and for-profit trade schools--because the federal government only sends money for loans and grants to approved schools.

But with rising tuition, student loan defaults nationally hovering near 20%, employers complaining about inept college graduates and embarrassing scandals like the research overcharges at Stanford, pressure is building for the government to begin regulating colleges as they do consumer services.

For the first time, a 1992 federal law spelled out exactly what accrediting associations were responsible for--including tracking default rates and statistics showing how successful a school’s graduates were in finding jobs--and it created government agencies that would take over the review of problem institutions. These new agencies, called State Postsecondary Review Entities, will be able to investigate a school’s finances and whether its advertising had been “misleading.”

Although the law was aimed at for-profit schools, David A. Longanecker, assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, said it telegraphed a “growing disaffection” with higher education in general.

Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, said the government’s move to “federalize” accreditation represents a potential “sea change” in how higher education does business. Although the public has confidence in America’s universities, opinion surveys show that people are “scared to death of the sticker price” of a college education, he said.

As a result, schools are under increasing pressure to prove they are getting results, said Atwell.

“We have to show something has happened to (students) during their four years besides seat time and grades,” said Atwell, whose group represents 1,600 schools nationwide. “None of those things tell you what’s going on in the place. They don’t get at the question of ‘value added.’ ”

The Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges has become so concerned about public accountability that it is considering a plan to measure how well students are educated and making public the results, as well as other findings of the accreditation process.

“There is a very significant body of opinion in higher education that says to the public, ‘Trust us. And don’t require us to produce any evidence (of results),’ ” said Weiner. “What we’re saying is that those days are over. Institutions and faculty have got to demonstrate that good things are happening to students. We think they are . . . but we’ve got to talk about our strengths and weaknesses in public.”

But for months the normally obscure accrediting body--which examines everyone from Stanford to the tiny, 63-student Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley--has been locked in a vituperative war with some of the biggest names in California academia over its proposed statement explaining how member institutions should interpret the term diversity.

While Weiner said the new statement was merely background for schools trying to understand a 1988 diversity guideline, some college officials view the new statement as an attempt by the association to force multiculturalism down their throats.

“We’re fundamentally opposed to it because it is an intrusion on institutional autonomy,” said Thomas Dillon, president of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula.

Dillon said his 200-student private Catholic college feared the statement could be used to force it to redesign its liberal arts core curriculum. There are no majors at the school and every student must read the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and about 100 other authors.

All save one, Jane Austen, are European men.

“If they mean we ought to include an author because of the gender, or because of the skin color, that’s not appropriate for this curriculum,” Dillon said. “We read them because of what they have to say about reality.”

Weiner added that Thomas Aquinas officials have been among the first and loudest opponents because they have done a poor job of diversifying their student body, which has only two black students.

But the tiny college has gained some powerful allies.

USC’s Sample sent a letter last week asking the association to table its votes and criticizing the “disingenuous” way the statement glosses over the difficulties of balancing diversity against open access. In a letter dated Feb. 10, Caltech’s Everhart urged the accrediting group to avoid a diversity standard that “appears to many to be political, not educational.”

Asked in a recent interview what he meant, Everhart said: “Have you followed the discussions on political correctness? . . . You can extend some of those arguments to this situation.”

Perhaps the statement’s most powerful foe, however, has been Stanford’s Casper. Stanford took flak from alumni and conservatives several years ago when it altered its traditional Western Civilization reading requirement to introduce authors from other cultures.

In a speech before the Stanford faculty senate on Feb. 3, Casper lambasted the diversity statement and declared “Enough is enough!” The senate voted to oppose the statement.

In an interview, Casper warned that tighter control by either accrediting bodies or the government would ruin a system of higher education that allows Stanford and Thomas Aquinas College to serve students of different tastes.

“Lemmings run into the sea together and I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I don’t want us all to do the same thing at the same time. That’s not what has made American institutions as good as they are--and they are stunning.”