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Comparing
colleges: Finally, a system that makes sense Season’s greetings from Green Bay’s University of Wisconsin! Cyndie joins me in wishing happy holidays to you and your families. Like all of you, we find this to be a hectic time of the year, but one made so rich and meaningful by family and friends. I write to you this month after returning from the annual meeting of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). This professional association proudly represents more than 430 colleges and universities throughout the United States. One important word — accountability — has been dominating the conversation involving my AASCU colleagues and just about everyone in higher education. State colleges and universities, including those in the UW System, have been at the forefront of a move to greater accountability. Leaders of these institutions understand that being accountable and responsive is crucial to our earning continuing support for public higher education. At UW-Green Bay, we welcome the growing emphasis on accountability. As chancellor, I am only a steward of this precious public resource. The owners — the people of our community, region and state — deserve to know what we’re doing in ways they can easily understand. Most people lead active, busy lives. Their time is a precious commodity. They should not have to wade through mounds of incomprehensible data to find out if their public institutions are meeting their expectations for service and efficiency. It’s not that accountability is something new here. For more than a decade, we and other UW System campuses have issued an annual report called “Achieving Excellence.” This report, introduced in 1993, was one of the nation’s first public accountability reports in higher education. It presents goals and measures common to all UW institutions as well as additional measures specific to our campus mission and values. It assesses how well we’re doing in areas such as efficient use of resources, student access and retention, and engagement with our community and region. “Achieving Excellence” has served its purpose well. We also recently completed our 10-year self-study prepared for the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, our regional accrediting agency. The HLC site review team, which visited UW-Green Bay in mid-November, informed us it will recommend that the University receive the maximum 10-year accreditation. |
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At Green Bay’s University of Wisconsin, we welcome the growing emphasis on accountability. Our recent accreditation review provided a valuable self-study experience. (The outside reviewers were favorably impressed.) Our newest reporting system will be another plus. The HLC self-study is much more than your typical 3,000-mile oil check. It is especially valuable because it requires us to conduct a critical analysis of where we’re at as an institution and to focus on what’s important to us as we move forward. For example, this year’s self-study drew our attention to the fact that we were operating under an outdated mission statement. Members of the campus community responded by developing a mission statement that affirmed a commitment to our core values while also addressing the changing needs of our community. Colleagues across the state praised the new statement for its simplicity and for clearly describing what makes a UW-Green Bay education distinctive. Time-tested accountability measures like “Achieving Excellence” and the accreditation review have been and will continue to be important to UW-Green Bay. However, we now are preparing to take the issue of accountability to a higher level. . . . continued |
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