Small State University was scheduled for a 10-year periodic review by WASC in October 1998. Thus, two years earlier, in the autumn of 1996, the university’s president asked the academic vice-president to develop a plan to prepare for the self-study and the site visit. He expressed his hope that the review could be used as a general planning exercise for the university as well, especially to identify new programme directions that might increase overall enrolment.
The first steps were to build a schedule and to design a process for carrying out the extensive self-study required by WASC. As with most universities, the university planned to allow a period of at least 18 months for conducting the self- study. This included: two to four months for planning a study that would suit its circumstances; 14 months (including intensive work during one summer) to carry out the self-study based on the work of nine or more separate work groups; and two to four months for circulating a draft report, organizing discussions, pulling together reactions and comments,
and preparing a final report. Annex 13 shows the schedule developed by Small State University.
The academic vice-president immediately formed a 15-person planning group to design the self-study. The group included the academic vice-president (who chaired the group), the chairpersons of four academic programmes, six senior faculty (one from each of the university’s constituent schools), and one senior staff member from each of four administrative offices: institutional research; admissions; business affairs; and academic planning. Over the next four weeks the planning group had three meetings in which it reviewed relevant facts about the university, developed an initial list of priority concerns, and proposed ways that the self-study might be organized. The planning group agreed that several important institutional concerns, which had initially been raised by the president, should be included in the study, including:
• the need to improve student retention in the first two years of baccalaureate study;
• possible new directions for undergraduate and graduate programmes; and
• development of a coherent plan for improving information technology resources, especially in support of academic programmes.
The planning group also considered several alternatives for how to organize the self-study so that it might best serve the university’s interests. It initially thought that it would propose a focused visit, one of the different options that WASC allowed as a way to offer universities greater flexibility in meeting accrediting requirements. This would give Small State University the opportunity to combine the planning work for the regional self-study with some preliminary work for accrediting visits that were scheduled in the next two years
for social work and for nursing. After gathering information and holding a range of conversations, however, it decided against this approach. Although a focused visit could offer some time-saving and reduce the university’s overall workload for meeting accrediting requirements, the planning group felt that it was too risky. There were problems with the social work programme and the time period offered by the regional accrediting agency’s schedule may not have been sufficient for fixing those problems. By keeping the accrediting procedures separate, it would still be able to resolve the problems in the social work programme before the visit of the social work accrediting agency.
Two weeks later, the planning group met with a WASC staff member to clarify WASC requirements and determine whether WASC concurred with its plan and the areas of emphasis it had proposed. When the WASC staff expressed surprise that the university had not chosen one of the different options that WASC now allowed, the planning group explained its reasoning in choosing the conventional option.
With agreement between the group and the WASC staff person, the planning group went back and completed a detailed self-study design and schedule, which it presented to the president. The president and academic vice-president discussed this plan for the self-study in a series of meetings: with the Dean’s Council at its regular Tuesday morning meeting, with senior staff at a regular weekly meeting, and with all faculty at the next Faculty Senate meeting, held once a month. Some modifications were made, primarily to avoid certain time-pressured points in the academic calendar, but the plan generally met with approval.
The self-study model that the university decided to follow was conventional in design (see Annex 11). The university would prepare
its self-study according to the nine accreditation standards (shown in Annex 6) that it was required to address. In turn, the self-study effort was organized into a sequence of nine work groups. Each work group would gather information and develop a section of the self- study report that corresponded to one of the accreditation standards. A Steering Committee was appointed to provide co-ordination and overall direction for the self-study. It was composed of 12 members, and included six faculty members, four administrators, one student, and one alumnus (a graduate operating a small business in the city). Of the six faculty members, three had been on the planning group and had shown both interest and dependability in working on the issues raised by the self-study; the three others were nominated by department chairpersons who had been on the planning group and who wanted their subject area to be represented but could not meet the needed time commitment themselves. The four administrators had also been on the planning group and, thus, had already developed a good understanding of what their offices must do to complete the self-study in their respective areas. Each of the faculty members on the Steering Committee was allotted ‘released time’ in order to work with the Committee; that is, they were released from a certain portion of their regular teaching duties. The chair of the Steering Committee was a well-liked faculty member who had taught mathematics and statistics at the university for the past 15 years and who previously had ser ved on the university’s Faculty Senate and Curriculum Committees. The nine work groups were to be chaired by the four administrators and five of the faculty. Although the academic vice-president was not a member of the Steering Committee, the Committee worked very closely with him throughout the self-study period.