IU Southeast is undergoing the final process of accreditation this semester to determine the qualities of the university.The accreditation process is a method for determining how the campus performs. The North Central Association of Colleges and Schools comes to IU Southeast every 10 years to see how the university has improved.
“The first thing is that they make sure we are doing what they are doing,” Debbie Finkel, director of Masters and Liberal Studies Program, said. “The process just ensures who we are and not just by keeping students but by keeping up with the best practices of how best to prepare students.”
From March 1 to March 3, consultant evaluators will be coming to IU Southeast to check on what the university is doing well at and identify areas of improvement.
Marty Rosen, director of Library Services, is familiar with the process.
“The evaluators will give us preliminary results after they come in March,” Rosen said. “They’ll meet early on with the chancellor, they’ll do their interviews, they’ll walk around campus and just check things out.”
A self-survey was created by faculty and staff to assess how they believe the institution is doing. It began in fall 2007 and was finished during the winter break in 2009.
The survey is a collaboration of five criteria for accreditation that the NCAC wanted IU Southeast to focus on.
“The first step is to gather a lot of information, documents and evidence that you can use to assess or evaluate where you are going,” Rosen said. “There were a total of about 35 people who were directly involved in that process of gathering information and they spent time evaluating it and interpreting it.”
Rosen was one of the co-coordinators for the self-survey. The first set of criteria for the survey was the mission and integrity of the school. The mission for IU Southeast is to continue to build and refine the university.
“The consultant evaluators are really evaluating us in terms of our mission, what are we trying to do, do we have the resources, applying those resources to achieve our mission, how are we assessing and what are we doing to improve ourselves,” Rosen said.
Some of the other criteria included preparing for the future, student learning and teaching effectiveness, as well as acquisition, discovery and application of knowledge.
Finkel said student learning and effective teaching are very important to IU Southeast and its mission.
“We want to see how our faculty is doing,” Finkel said. “This is the chapter where we really want to show we know what we’re doing and that we’re doing it effectively because that can be a hard thing to demonstrate.”
The last of the criteria is engagement and service, which is how the university is involved with the community. This ensures the institution is paying attention to the community and their methods for being responsive to that community.
“We don’t live in a vacuum,” Finkel said. “We do live in a Southern Indiana community. The NCAC wants to know that we acknowledge that there is a bond between students and the community.”
emerging trend to do accreditation more often.
“There are two different approaches to accreditation,” Rosen said. “One is the traditional way and one is kind of a continuous, on-going routine. I think accreditation is probably going to move more toward that constant evaluation.”
IU Southeast has been accredited since 1969. However, if an institution were unable or unqualified to receive accreditation, there would be many drawbacks for the students and faculty.
“If a school doesn’t get reaccredited, it would be a pretty drastic situation,” Rosen said. “Schools that don’t get accreditation, the students there aren’t eligible for financial aid and schools aren’t eligible for grants. Employers often don’t accept students applying for a job in their field.”
The benefit of getting accreditation is that it allows universities to check on themselves and find ways of improvement.
“The bonus is that the universities are always trying to better themselves,” Finkel said. “If the NCA tells us things we need to work on, it’s like somebody externally pushing us to do better. If they told us everything was great, it wouldn’t stop us from trying to better ourselves but we’d be more internally motivated to do it.”
Another bonus was that the people who helped work on the self study were able to look at the university in a different way.
“It forces them to look at the campus in a very broad way and get out of their own, special area,” Rosen said.
Many people participated in creating the self-survey and helped focus on how to better IU Southeast.
“In getting the self-study together, there were people involved on different levels,” Finkel said. “Faculty was involved, students were involved and staff was involved.”
By CLAIRE MUNN
Staff Writer