APA Faces Accreditation Crisis Amid Charges of Political Capture

The American Psychological Association is under serious federal pressure after a bipartisan Education Department advisory board voted 7-4 last month to recommend suspending recognition of the APA's Commission on Accreditation. The immediate trigger was testimony alleging a pervasive culture of antisemitism tolerated within psychology programs and professional settings. But two critics — an evolutionary biologist and a clinical psychologist — argue the antisemitism issue is just the most visible symptom of a deeper institutional dysfunction: organized psychology has transformed from a scientific enterprise into a vehicle for left-wing political activism.

Their central exhibit is APA Division 39, the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, whose annual New York conference drew nearly 800 attendees across 90 panels. By their count, roughly 70 of those 90 panels carried an explicit ideological agenda, and every overtly political speaker represented the political left — no conservative, libertarian, centrist, or heterodox voices were included. Conference sessions included workshops on abolishing gender assessment guidelines, a queer anarchist psychoanalysis panel, and a session on youth suicide framed through 'queer and crip theorizations' connecting suicide prevention to incarceration politics. One session concluded with a drag performance; another featured the author of a manifesto titled 'Abolish the Family.' Several panels carried APA continuing-education credit.

Rather than retreating from this trajectory in the face of accreditation threats, the APA elected Candice Hargons as its next president. Hargons has publicly declared that 'our common enemy is systemic intersectional oppression' and has argued that scientific integrity requires rejecting what she calls the positivist paradigm's claim to objectivity. Her recent scholarship includes papers on liberatory sex-positive science, Black feminist embodiment through yoga, and a 2026 study on how Black women's awareness of kink and BDSM informs their sex lives. The critics characterize her election not as a course correction but as a deliberate doubling down.

The broader argument is that accreditation exists to guarantee professional competence and intellectual standards worthy of public trust — not merely to screen for one form of discrimination. Therapists, the critics note, hold significant authority over vulnerable people, and patients deserve confidence that their treatment is evidence-based rather than shaped by political commitments. The piece calls on the Education Department to weigh whether an association so thoroughly committed to activist goals should retain its government-backed authority over psychological training.