DEAN'S CORNER

Aligning Faculty Governance with Maintenance of Accreditation
by Beck A. Taylor, dean, Brock School of Business, Samford University

AACSB’s maintenance of accreditation process, still relatively new for many of us, elevates three aspects of our schools while maintaining an allegiance to all of the accreditation standards. This relatively new, streamlined process was a welcome change, and it presents some opportunities for deans to examine the role of faculty governance, particularly as it relates to accreditation maintenance.

As we all have heard, the maintenance of accreditation process does not discard the need for our schools to adhere closely to all of the standards, but it does elevate three crucial components of our continuous improvement processes: strategic management, participant standards, and assurance of learning.

The maintenance of accreditation process presents an opportunity for deans to reconsider the faculty governance structures in place at their schools with an eye toward supporting these three important functions. Many of us labor to fit strategic management, participant standards, and assurance of learning into our numerous and disparate faculty committees. At my own institution, the faculty govern through traditional undergraduate and graduate curriculum committees, a faculty development committee, and a learning assessment committee, the last of which was added only two years ago. Although this structure has served us well in the past, we are considering aligning more closely our standing faculty committees with the three named maintenance of accreditation functions. At a relatively small school like ours where we must accomplish all of the same tasks as a school that has a faculty much larger than ours, the idea of streamlining our faculty governance committees while at the same time promoting maintenance of accreditation procedures is particularly appealing.

For example, on a recent maintenance of accreditation visit to the Bill Greehey School of Business at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, a school of similar size and scope to my own, I was thrilled to see that the faculty governed continuous improvement through three committees that were perfectly aligned with the maintenance of accreditation peer review team’s priorities. Changing faculty governance structures to embody strategic management, participant standards, and assurance of learning, perhaps with the creation of three committees that bear those names as the Greehey School accomplished, seems to make much sense as we guide our schools through the process and attempt to economize on faculty deployment. Collapsing many committees into several also accomplishes much needed integration and facilitates communication.

At the Brock School of Business, we are considering collapsing the undergraduate and graduate curriculum committees and the learning assessment committee into one Assurance of Learning Committee whose charge would be to place all curriculum issues under the lens of learning assessment – currently, our curriculum committees often act unaware of important aspects related to assurance of learning. Of course, this new committee also will be charged with managing the entire learning assessment process, examining data from that process, and managing subsequent improvements to our curriculum.

Next, our faculty development committee would be renamed the Participants Standards Committee, and it would be charged with maintaining the school’s standards not only for academically and professionally qualified faculty and the structures for maintaining those qualifications, but this committee also would govern our student admissions standards and guidelines, as well as other aspects such as diversity goals. My experience is that student standards are often ignored within the faculty governance process and delegated instead to an administrative function.

Finally, representatives (perhaps the chairs) from both the Assurance of Learning Committee and the Participant Standards Committee could serve on the Strategic Management Committee, perhaps led by the dean, who also would include important strategic faculty leaders such as program directors and department chairs. This committee would receive recommendations from the other committees regarding annual action items, incorporate those into the school’s strategic plan, and monitor the plan’s success.

This new faculty governance structure, or one like it, serves to align the school’s important involvement of faculty in the continuous improvement process with strategic management, assurance of learning, and participant standards, each of which will undergo close scrutiny during the maintenance of accreditation peer review team’s visit. Deans should be thinking about integrating the new maintenance of accreditation process into faculty governance structures to better enable their schools to articulate intended strategic goals in the language of accreditation maintenance. Other benefits of this realignment, such as increased integration and better communication, also may accrue.
 

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