Alaska’s Accreditor Issues a Warning to the System

Ian Perez for The Chronicle

The University of Alaska’s Board of Regents will hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday to deal with a disturbing message delivered in the midst of restructuring discussions that have found the system’s president at odds with its three chancellors.

The message came from the system’s accreditor, which warned that confusion over leadership roles and authorities is jeopardizing the accreditation status of the system’s three universities, in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau.

In an email to university leaders on Thursday, Sonny Ramaswamy, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, wrote that the accreditor was concerned that the three universities had failed to meet critical accreditation standards.

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“We respectfully urge you to take immediate steps to provide clarity around the authority, roles, and responsibilities of the University of Alaska system and its respective institutions and their leadership,” the email states. “We also respectfully urge you to continue to create a space for inclusive dialogue as the Board of Regents deliberates on the future structure of the University of Alaska system.”

The commission directed the university to report on its progress, either collectively or individually, by October 31.

Based on an on-site visit in Fairbanks and recent media reports, “we got concerned that the process was not transparent and inclusive,” Ramaswamy wrote in response to questions from The Chronicle on Sunday. “We have explicit standards that speak to shared governance and roles and responsibilities of the various layers from the board to the president to the chancellors and also faculty, staff, and students.”

In an August 1 email to the system’s chancellors, James R. Johnsen, the university’s president, reminded them that the Board of Regents had directed him to move ahead with a plan to consolidate the three universities into a single accredited institution. It would include the 13 community campuses that are each linked to one of the universities.

In the email, which was obtained by Alaska’s KTUU-TV, Johnsen demanded that the chancellors support that directive, and issued a veiled threat to fire anyone who couldn’t.

On Friday the system’s three chancellors — Cathy Sandeen at Anchorage, Daniel M. White at Fairbanks, and Richard Caulfield at Southeast — joined Johnsen and the regents’ board chair in a joint letter to the Northwest Commission pledging their cooperation. Wednesday’s board meeting will help “ensure that we are working together effectively and inclusively, with a clear understanding of our respective roles and responsibilities,” they wrote.

The chancellors had urged the regents to consider a consortium model that would retain separate accreditations for the three universities and allow them to work together to shave costs. After the board rejected their idea and gave Johnsen the green light to move ahead with a single-accreditation proposal, he issued his email expanding on a point he’d made in an earlier directive: that he was the official spokesman for the university, and that communications on budget issues had to respect the regents’ prerogatives and be cleared by him.

“After consideration of its options, the board has now taken definitive action and ended debate for officers and senior administrators of the university,” Johnsen wrote. “As officers of the university, I know you will unequivocally support the board’s decision and all efforts toward implementation.”

Cooperation and communication across campuses was essential, he said. “If you are unable to support the board’s decision or implementation efforts, or cannot commit to our approach or these expectations, please advise me in writing immediately so that we may arrange for a smooth transition.”

Some faculty leaders protested that the president was stifling the chancellors at a time when their input was most critical.

The email called into question the chancellors’ abilities to act independently, said Max Kullberg, an assistant professor in a program on the Anchorage campus that provides medical education to students in Alaska and four other sparsely populated states.

“How can chancellors collaborate or add to the conversation when they are under threat of losing employment?” he asked. He added that there had been “shockingly little shared governance” in the restructuring decisions, which he argued were biased toward a single-university model.

John Davies, chairman of the Board of Regents, said that, in the context of the existential budget crisis the university was facing at the time, Johnsen’s order was justified.

The president’s memo went out when the system was facing a devastating $135-million cut from Michael J. Dunleavy, Alaska’s Republican governor, representing 41 percent of the system’s budget from the state. At that point the regents directed the president to move ahead with a proposal to consolidate the three universities into one accredited university with branch campuses.

The governor later reached a deal with the regents to reduce the budget cut in half — to $70 million — and spread it out over three years. The regents lifted the financial exigency it had imposed when it thought it would have to quickly fire tenured faculty members and close programs. They also voted to allow consideration of models other than a single university.

Davies called the accreditor’s letter “very concerning.”

“We have been meeting weekly with the Northwest Commission, so it was a little bit of a surprise to get a letter written in such stark terms,” he said. He agreed, in an interview over the weekend, that it’s important to clarify governance roles and seek more input from the university’s many constituents.

“I think there’s some concern on the part of the chancellors that it’s not clear what their roles and responsibilities are, and I think that’s what was included in the letter,” he said. Davies added that the chancellors had met with the president every week, and they sit at every board meeting. Still, the board plans to double down on seeking their input, Davies said.

“What’s really clear is that we have to work more closely with the chancellors so they’re comfortable with whatever direction we’re taking,” he said. “If there are some really good reasons why moving in one direction will jeopardize some of the key programmatic accreditations, we need to know that.”

At the same time, the clock is ticking, and the board faces conflicting pressures from lawmakers, the governor, students, faculty members, and others, Davies said.

“While the three-year extension is necessary and welcome, it doesn’t remove the urgency from making these decisions faster than anyone would want,” he said.

The Alaska Legislature and the governor have specifically directed the regents to look into a single accreditation for the university. “We can’t just blow that off,” Davies said. “If we’re not going to go there, we have to have credible reasons. It can’t just be we don’t want to.”

The email from the university’s accreditor raised no concerns about the quality of academics or research, he stressed.

Sine Anahita, an associate professor of sociology at Fairbanks who leads the flagship campus’s Faculty Senate, said it isn’t clear what standards the accreditor feels aren’t being met. “Many people are working off of assumptions about what the letter means, and this just creates more fear, more anxiety, and frankly, more anger that in my opinion is misdirected at the president and Board of Regents,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

The memo from the president “was sent when it looked like the only way the University of Alaska would survive in any form was to consolidate, terminate a third of our faculty and staff, raze buildings, sell off all of our assets, and cut the academic bureaucracies at all three universities,” she wrote in an email. “It was a ‘war-time decision,’ a decision made in the heat of the battle for survival.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.