## Facts

- Marjorie Webster Junior College operated in the District of Columbia as a proprietary (for-profit) junior college and was licensed to award associate degrees.
- The Middle States Association was a private, nonprofit regional accrediting body for secondary schools and institutions of higher education.
- In 1966, Marjorie Webster applied to Middle States for accreditation.
- Middle States maintained a longstanding policy of accrediting only nonprofit institutions and treated proprietary institutions as ineligible.
- Middle States rejected the application without evaluating academic merits, citing only the school’s proprietary status.
- Marjorie Webster alleged that denial of regional accreditation impaired credit transfer and degree recognition and threatened serious, potentially irreparable competitive harm.

## Issues

1. Whether Middle States’ categorical refusal to accredit proprietary institutions constituted an unreasonable restraint of trade under Sherman Act § 1 (including a purported group boycott).
2. Whether Middle States’ accreditation decisions amounted to governmental action such that constitutional due process requirements applied.

## Decision

- The D.C. Circuit reversed the district court’s judgment and vacated the injunction requiring Middle States to consider Marjorie Webster for accreditation.
- The court held the challenged accreditation policy was not subject to antitrust liability on the record presented because it reflected a good-faith educational judgment rather than a commercially motivated restraint of trade.
- The court held Middle States was a private actor, not sufficiently connected to government to trigger constitutional due process constraints.

## Legal Principles

- Sherman Act § 1 targets unreasonable restraints that are commercial in character; a nonprofit association’s good-faith educational standard-setting is generally not treated as a prohibited trade restraint merely because it has economic consequences.
- A categorical exclusion associated with professional or educational quality-control (without evidence of members’ economic self-interest or commercial rivalry) is not necessarily condemned as a per se unlawful group boycott.
- Widespread reliance by public agencies or other institutions on a private accreditor’s decisions does not, without governmental creation, control, or delegation, convert the accreditor into a state actor subject to constitutional due process.

## Conclusion

The court treated accreditation as a private, nonprofit educational function and concluded that Middle States’ nonprofit-only eligibility rule, though economically significant to the excluded school, did not establish a Sherman Act § 1 violation and did not constitute governmental action requiring due process.


Marjorie Webster Junior Coll., Inc. v. Middle States Ass’n of Colls. & Secondary Schs., Inc., 432 F.2d 650 (D.C. Cir. 1970)