Sound familiar at all?
“As we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change — especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly,” said Brad Hamm, Medill’s dean, in a message to alumni. “All fields benefit from a world-class review process, and unfortunately the gap between what it could, and should, be is huge.”
No, it’s not the ALA COA under discussion here — this is how one dean of a well regarded journalism program referred to the accrediting process in his discipline. The full article can be found here.
Seems like most professional fields, at least the fast moving ones like information and journalism, have common responses to the constraints of accreditors. What should be about quality assurance has become a vehicle for compliance and control by the conservatives. The suggestion of risk-adjusted accreditation would be welcomed by me, and fit with my general argument for a a process that spent more time improving the weak or under-resourced programs rather than mechanically demanding every program follow the same review schedule, but even this is insufficient. Until such time as real estimates of program quality are defined, and then applied fairly and uniformly, the process cannot have real value. Accreditors can hide all they want behind claims of protecting student interests but it’s a sham – and it’s a shame.