Three years ago, Whitman faculty members went to Seattle to attend a conference on to learn about what it meant to be accredited.
“The first year our heads were spinning because we were just getting introduced to all of this, and it felt like they were giving us this monster,” said English professor Jean Carwile Masteller, who helped to write a report on Whitman College for the Northwest Commission of Colleges and Universities (NCCU).
Eight members of the NCCU will visit Whitman in October to evaluate and report on various aspects of the College in a decennial process called accreditation. The NCCU evaluates on nine specific standards and makes recommendations and commendations for areas of excellence and areas which need improvement.
For three years a committee of Whitman faculty has worked to write comprehensive reports on Whitman’s compliance to these nine standards. Associate Dean of Faculty Tom Callister chaired the committee.
“Something I don’t think people understand is that on the one hand it is a nice snapshot of college, but on the other hand it is through someone else’s lens,” said Callister. “These reports are written with real constraint.
There are things that don’t make it into the report that are really great aspects of Whitman, but they don’t fall under any of the standards.”
Despite constraint, the committee that wrote the report chose to write it in two volumes, allowing each academic department to address their unique ways of dealing with course material.
“Putting all the department reports together allowed us to show how different people go about assessing what they do, and how they go about incorporating that into our program,” said Carwile Masteller. “We learned an awful lot.”
Accreditation is important because it affects students’ eligibility to be accepted to graduate and further undergraduate programs, faculty members’ ability to receive grants or federal funding and college’s ability to do different programs.
“It’s a stamp of quality,” said Callister. “If Whitman wasn’t credited, you wouldn’t be able to go to graduate school.”
Carwile Masteller and Callister agreed that there is no real danger of Whitman not being accredited, but the quality of the report is still important. In recent years, more and more schools up for accreditation have received recommendations in areas of assessment: that is, the measurements a school uses to asses its students in various ways.
“Some of [the emphasis on assessment] comes out of the No Child Left Behind mentality of accountability. Some of it comes out of the notion that accreditation is a one-size-fits-all thing,” said Callister. “There’s a very prevalent idea that most things can be measured.”
While Whitman has ways of evaluating to ensure that students are learning what they’re supposed to be learning, its liberal arts philosophy sometimes deals with assessment in unconventional ways.
“One of the things we decided very early on was that [Whitman] assesses all the time, but we rarely call it assessment: if ever: and we rarely quantify it, with the exception of student grades,” said Carwile Masteller.
Students will be invited to participate in the accreditation process on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at noon, when there will be an open forum for students to answer questions asked by the committee. Similar sessions will be held for Whitman faculty and staff.
Findings will be reported at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 2. The committee will read a list of commendations and recommendations, citing the standards for reference. President George Bridges will comment on the report as well. The meeting should last about 15 minutes.
The accreditation process won’t end until January when Callister and Bridges will go to Seattle to stand before the commission, where they will be told how various commendations and recommendations were interpreted in terms of severity.
“I think we have written a solid report,” said Carwile Masteller. “We may not say everything there is to say, but we address the standards.”
