The stately wood-paneled walls of the John Grisham Room in the library at Mississippi State University give it a formal air. At 8:30 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, a small band of academic professionals entered the room to begin a serious job. During the course of just three days, the group of seven men and two women would seek the information and impressions they needed to help determine the accreditation status of this land-grant university, which enrolls about 20,000 students.
The visit began and ended with a meeting between reviewers and the university’s top administrators, including the president, the provost, and the general counsel. In between, there were discussions with dozens more faculty members, staff members, and students. The visiting team pored over the details of audits, assessments, curriculum design, distance learning, faculty credentials, financial controls, and student-learning outcomes, among many other topics.
The visit was what many say is the most valuable part of accreditation: where reviewers from peer institutions get to ask the hard questions, face to face; where the university has to explain what it does, how it meets the accreditor’s standards and federal regulations, fulfills its mission, and, most important, ensures that students are learning. Reviewers, too, say they learn from the visits, gathering ideas to carry back to their home institutions or finding out about pitfalls to avoid.
Like much of the accreditation process, the details of such site visits are little known to those outside academe, in part because they are not open to the public. (The Chronicle was allowed to document the process at Mississippi State under the terms of a confidentiality agreement that bars it from publishing the names of the visiting reviewers and the details of their discussions.)
Despite the secrecy, supporters of the process argue that this kind of peer review is an antidote to the criticisms of accreditation being leveled by lawmakers, policy groups, and proponents of technological disruption. The process is rigorous and thorough, supporters say, requiring an institution to demonstrate that it is taking steps to improve its academic performance.
It’s not true that accreditors are lax in upholding standards among their peers because of collegiality or fear of retribution, said Timothy N. Chamblee, director of the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at Mississippi State. Reviewers take their jobs seriously and aren’t afraid to call out the problems they see, he said.
“It is not what they say it is on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Chamblee said. “It’s not just a ‘good ole boy’ network.”
Checking Boxes
This three-day review marked the home stretch of Mississippi State’s 10-year accreditation cycle with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, one of the nation’s six regional accreditation bodies. Later this year, the commission’s Executive Council will vote on whether to reaffirm Mississippi State’s accreditation—a requirement for its students to receive federal financial aid.
By the time the reviewers arrived on the campus, the university had been preparing to be reaccredited for nearly two years, including compiling several hundred pages of information on how the institution is meeting more than 90 separate standards and federal requirements. In a separate room of the library sat 10 thick binders filled with reports and data, the undergraduate and graduate bulletins of the university, bound copies of the institution’s compliance study, and a focused report responding to issues raised before the visit by a separate set of reviewers.
The visitors, too, have spent weeks preparing, reading the university’s documentation and drafting an initial report. Reviewers, who must be nominated by the president of their institution, are chosen for their expertise in certain areas and then trained by the accreditor.
The group visiting Mississippi State included a president, a vice provost, an assistant vice president for finance, a dean of a college of arts and sciences, an associate vice chancellor for research, a dean of students, an associate director of assessment and research studies, and an associate professor of political science. A vice president of the accrediting commission, a former college president, was also there to coordinate the reviewers’ work and occasionally to clarify the standards or the process.
Much of the first day was taken up with making sure the university was actually doing what it said in its documentation. After an introductory meeting with top administrators, the visitors broke into smaller groups throughout the library for more than a dozen separate meetings with various other administrators and faculty members.
Some of those meetings were meant to follow up on concerns raised by a separate group of reviewers, who had examined the university’s self-study.
“We do know there are certain areas where there will be questions,” said Jerome A. Gilbert, provost and executive vice president at Mississippi State.
For example, Mr. Gilbert said, visiting site teams often have to confirm that some of the university’s faculty members have the proper credentials to be teaching the courses that they are assigned. On paper, some instructors might not have the necessary degrees but may have professional experience that makes them qualified, he said.
“Reviewers don’t always know the context—why we would select an individual with unusual credentials,” Mr. Gilbert said.
Other meetings were required to verify that the university was meeting federal requirements, such as having a process for collecting and resolving student complaints on academic and even potentially criminal issues like sexual assault.
While the university had already described that process in its written materials, the federal government requires the accreditor to examine actual records of complaints on the campus, note how they were filed, and ascertain that they were followed to their conclusion. On this morning, a golf cart took the visiting dean of students to several offices on the campus, including the provost’s office and the office of the Title IX coordinator.
“Most people wouldn’t understand the extent of the review,” said Thomas Bourgeois, dean of students at Mississippi State. “It’s rigorous.”
While some critics have complained of the tedium of the accreditation process, the university has an obligation to take care of its students, he said.
“We’re protecting a precious commodity,” he said.
Proving Learning
Later in the afternoon, and during much of the following morning, the reviewers met with faculty members and administrators to discuss the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan, a requirement of the Southern Association that the institution develop a program to specifically address and improve student learning across the campus.
Mississippi State’s enhancement plan is a focus on undergraduate writing skills and is titled “Maroon & Write"—a play on its athletics colors of maroon and white. The program is meant to encourage undergraduates to engage in a variety of writing, not just research or final papers, and in classes outside of English.
The university began testing the program in the fall and will train faculty members in how to incorporate more and varied kinds of writing assignments into their courses. Mississippi State also plans to collect writing samples from all new freshmen during the fall orientation to assess students’ ability from the beginning of their academic careers.
The largest meeting of the visit occurred on the second morning as nearly 20 faculty members and administrators filled a room in the library’s Templeton Music Museum. The tone of the meetings was collegial, but the reviewers were clearly engaged and digging deeply into the design of the new writing program, its finances, oversight, and accountability.
After more than an hour of questions, Deborah O. Lee, an associate professor and coordinator of library services at Mississippi State, said she was not surprised that the session had zeroed in on whether the plan had a clear process for actually measuring improvements in writing.
“We’re looking for feedback—whatever makes this program stronger,” said Ms. Lee, one of two faculty members who are directing Maroon & Write.
If the reviewers are having questions, Ms. Lee said, “we either need to do a better job of communicating or change our design.”
Real Value?
On Wednesday, the visiting reviewers met in separate luncheons with students, members of the state’s Board of Trustees, and faculty members. At a buffet in the student union, a select group of students shared their experiences with three of the visitors. Students said they supported the university’s increased focus on writing—several had already participated in pilot courses in the university’s forestry-studies program.
But beyond that, they had scant knowledge of the accreditation process.
“I don’t know anything about the formality of it,” said Donald M. (Field) Brown, a senior majoring in English and philosophy and a Rhodes scholar who grew up in Vicksburg, Miss. “I just kind of assume the name ‘university’ meant something,” he said.
Mr. Brown’s lack of familiarity with accreditation underscored a major challenge for accrediting agencies: communicating the value of the process to students, parents, the public, and policy makers.
Federal lawmakers and some influential policy groups in Washington are taking a hard look at accreditation, whether it is effective as a tool for improving quality, and whether the process should continue to serve as a requirement for federal financial aid.
Many faculty members and administrators at Mississippi State, however, say the accreditation process benefits both students and the institution generally, even if it remains obscure to the public.
“At its most fundamental, accreditation is identification of legitimacy,” said Gerald A. Emison, a professor of political science and public policy at Mississippi State and president of the faculty senate.
The criticisms of accreditation are being driven by a worldview that overvalues the role of the marketplace, he said. But accreditation relies on the rigor of the process to make institutions “address the unpleasantries,” he said.
Just preparing for the visit is what makes institutions improve, Mr. Emison said: “People have to think carefully and deliberately about what it means to do these things.”
On Thursday morning, the visiting reviewers met briefly with the senior administrators, making a few recommendations for improvement, and wrapped up their work in the Grisham room.
Back in his office, Mark E. Keenum, Mississippi State’s president since 2009, said the time, effort, and expense of the process were worth it for the institution and for taxpayers—even some of the more tedious elements, such as verifying compliance with federal standards.
“I wouldn’t want them to skip it,” Mr. Keenum said. “If the federal government is going to provide money, as thorough a review as possible is a good thing.”
Mr. Keenum, who is vice chairman of the Southern Association’s Executive Council (and will recuse himself from its vote on the university’s accreditation), acknowledged that the process had its limitations. But he questioned whether accreditation could be replaced without a drastic increase in the role of the federal government in regulating higher education.
“Is it foolproof? Absolutely not. Nothing is,” he said. “But I would challenge anyone to come up a better system.”