Engaging Skeptical Faculty in Accreditation

• Academics will more readily participate in accreditation when discussions focus on improving teaching, learning, and curricula rather than on satisfying external requirements.
• Consistent messaging from institutional leaders and respected faculty champions builds trust and fosters shared ownership of the process.
• Schools will make data collection more streamlined and sustainable by integrating it into everyday academic work rather than treating it as a periodic reporting exercise.

 
Accreditation often feels like a foreign activity within academic life. Academics are rarely trained for it, and the internal promotion criteria at most schools almost completely ignore it. This leaves many faculty to view the entire exercise as a bureaucratic burden imposed by outsiders who do not understand their disciplines.

Their view is not surprising. Most professors enter academia through doctoral programs that evaluate teaching and research through student feedback and peer review rather than through the application of global standards and external frameworks. When administrators introduce accreditation, faculty reactions can be mixed, ranging from quiet disengagement to skepticism about its relevance.

But most academics who seem resistant to accreditation simply lack a clear understanding of its value to their work. Many have never been taught how assurance of learning (AoL) systems work, how accreditation standards are interpreted, or how AoL evidence contributes to the continuous improvement of a school’s programs.

This is particularly true for early-career academics. They are just starting to navigate a complex academic ecosystem as they struggle to understand how a university operates and what structural challenges it faces. At the same time, they are learning to manage intense, competing demands on their time.

Introducing abstract compliance frameworks at this stage can make their disorientation worse—but only if schools make no effort to prepare them. Administrators must engage professors who see accreditation as disconnected from the activities that define academic life—and this starts with promoting cultures of accreditation literacy.

Below, we share strategies that administrators can adopt to build such cultures and enhance trust in the value of accreditation among academics. By taking five actions, schools can remove many of the most preventable obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth and rewarding accreditation process.

1. Connect Accreditation to Academic Portfolios

Engagement changes noticeably when accreditation conversations are connected to what professors are teaching across departments rather than to templates and reporting systems. Academics might resist compliance language, but they are highly responsive to discussions about the issues that keep them up at night, such as how to improve the student experience, address chaotic assessment design, reduce overloads, and strengthen educational quality.

For instance, during a recent curriculum mapping exercise for an undergraduate program at one of our schools, administrators found that three separate modules were testing the exact same skill across different terms. It was a massive eye-opener. In some cases, discussions revealed that important capabilities such as systems thinking or sustainability were heavily concentrated in isolated modules rather than embedded across programs.

Walking into a room full of tired educators and tossing around terms such as “assurance of learning” or “competency mapping” is the perfect way to cause everyone to tune out.

If we want to break through the noise, we should drop the compliance jargon entirely. Walking into a room full of tired educators and tossing around terms such as “assurance of learning” or “competency mapping” is the perfect way to cause everyone to tune out instantly. A conversation about how the school can better achieve faculty sufficiency may generate resistance, while a conversation about whether students are developing the intended capabilities across a program can produce much more open engagement.

We should spark conversations about what educators already care about. Even better, we should tailor each discussion to each internal audience: An early-career academic worried about workload will likely be inspired by a different conversation than a senior professor defending disciplinary autonomy.

2. Create Shared Ownership

In most settings, faculty view accreditation as an administrative burden. As an example, after administrators at one school presented an AoL strategy in a recent meeting, a professor asked bluntly what the strategy had to do with a major funding application that was in progress. To that researcher, the process was just a distraction from “real” value-adding work.

This friction points to a lack of clear ownership. Too often, schools frame accreditation as the responsibility of a small group of people who “get it done.” As a result, when administrators request data or input, they are perceived as pushing extra work onto academics rather than engaging in a necessary activity that departments own together. Fixing this misconception means shifting the narrative from a top-down demand to a shared responsibility, where individual departments understand their stakes in the outcome.

Accreditation projects require genuine buy-in from the top. Deans and vice-chancellors cannot just mandate compliance; they should actively champion the effort. Just as importantly, middle managers and department heads need to echo the same message. When faculty hear a consistent narrative from every level of leadership, accreditation appears more coherent and is easier for them to take seriously.

While leadership commitment is essential, faculty often place greater trust in informal interactions with respected peers than in formal messages from the institution. Likewise, identifying faculty champions who will explain accreditation through their own experiences often proves more effective than sending repeated top-down communications. Colleagues are generally more receptive when messages explaining the necessity and value of accreditation come from both peers and school administrators.

3. Build Trust Before Demanding Evidence

Accreditation projects falter if faculty feel as if they are being set up to discuss their “failures” during performance reviews. And their apprehension makes sense: Accreditation often exposes gaps and inconsistencies in teaching. If people suspect that these imperfections will be held against them, they will hold back.

For example, during a probation review, a brilliant early-career researcher, whom a school desperately needed to retain, confided the fear that a lack of engagement with assurance of learning could lead to the researcher losing the job. But that lack of engagement stemmed from a fear of making mistakes in a process that scholar had never been trained for.

When institutions do not offer professors psychological safety, they risk generating data that confirm existing assumptions rather than support meaningful learning.

Establishing trust with faculty members ahead of time will allay such fears—and it is particularly important when accreditation uncovers uncomfortable findings. Professors are far more willing to engage with evidence of weak student performance or inconsistent assessment practices when they believe the purpose is to work toward improvement rather than seek accountability. When institutions do not offer professors psychological safety, they risk generating data that confirm existing assumptions rather than support meaningful learning.

4. Align Accreditation With Academic Incentives

Even with leadership support, academics will still ask the obvious: “What’s in it for me?” Not surprisingly, this question reflects a structural contradiction ingrained in the promotion and tenure processes at many higher education institutions. Too often, schools demand that professors dedicate weeks to curriculum mapping and data collection, while internal promotion systems prioritize securing research grants and publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

When this contradiction is in force, it’s no wonder that many academics see this work as something that sits outside the activities that will affect their annual reviews.

This is especially true during peak workload periods, when they might either superficially address an accreditation request or ignore it altogether. During peak times, institutions are more likely to receive helpful responses if they identify a small issue that faculty already recognize as important, rather than asking them to address the full accreditation framework.

Given the realities of academic work, accreditation should be sufficiently rewarded, framed as a tool for securing departmental resources or for offering evidence of service for a promotion portfolio. Accreditation activities should also be included in workload allocations, so that this effort aligns with the realities of academic life.

5. Develop a Long-Term, Transparent Strategy

Treating accreditation like a sprint almost certainly leads to resistance. Panicking and trying to overhaul entire systems in a single chaotic semester triggers instant institutional paralysis.

Instead of treating accreditation as a disruptive event that occurs every few years, schools should incorporate data collection and analysis into everyday practices. Over time, accreditation will become embedded into departmental culture rather than merely serving as a recurring disruption. By keeping changes small and manageable, leadership can lower the anxiety around the process and prevent the project from becoming a periodic administrative crisis.

Instead of treating accreditation as a disruptive event that occurs every few years, schools should incorporate data collection and analysis into everyday practices.

Institutions should also avoid situations where educators spend weeks preparing curriculum maps and assessment data, only to never hear how the information was used. When data goes into a black hole, the effort feels entirely wasted. If institutions do not close the feedback loop and demonstrate how the data informed decisions or improvements, participation quickly drops.

A Practical Roadmap

Schools seeking a more systematic approach to promoting accreditation literacy may consider the following sequence:

Phase 1—Build accreditation capacity and literacy.

1. Establish an accreditation steering committee with faculty representation from across the school.
2. Introduce accreditation concepts during faculty induction meetings and ongoing development activities.

Phase 2—Engage, collect and measure.

3. Identify program challenges that educators already recognize and use these as anchor points for accreditation discussions.
4. Involve faculty in collecting and interpreting evidence.

Phase 3—Communicate, act, and create an ongoing accreditation cycle.

5. Communicate findings transparently and work toward collective agreement on actions toward improvement.
6. Embed data collection and review within annual program processes.
7. Share outcomes regularly, so faculty can see how evidence informs decision-making and resource allocation.

Distinctive Cultures, Similar Objectives

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for engaging skeptical academics. Every institution has a distinctive culture and mission-driven priorities. However, successful accreditation efforts share common characteristics. They build accreditation literacy early, create shared ownership, and align expectations with incentives.

Regardless of a school’s mission, strengths, or weaknesses, faculty should be treated as partners who own the quality of their programs, not suspects surviving a bureaucratic audit. When schools make this shift, they will transform accreditation from being a periodic compliance exercise into an ongoing schoolwide effort to improve institutional performance and student learning outcomes.