WASC Open Forum 12/4/07

Hello All!

For those who are already familiar with WASC accreditation, please skip to paragraph 2. For those who are unfamiliar, begin reading here. WASC stands for Western Association of Schools and Colleges. It is the organization which accredits Sonoma State University. SSU has been WASC accredited since 1969. In order to maintain WASC accreditation, schools are normally reviewed every 5 or 10 years. Sonoma State is currently undergoing such a review.

SSU has created an Accreditation Review Steering Committee (ARSC) composed of faculty and staff with President Whitney Diver as the student representative. In order to fully involve the campus community ARSC has decided to hold WASC Open Forums to keep us informed of the process as well as to give us the opportunity to offer feedback on the materials prepared by Sonoma State for the WASC team to review. Following are my notes on the first WASC open meeting from December 4, 2007.

To see Sonoma State's Portfolio including the reflective essays, please go to:

http://www.sonoma.edu/aa/portfolio/

The visiting team has been announced and it will be headed by Paul Gaston of Kent State University. He is considered an expert in GE reform. The visiting team will be here March 12-14, 2008 and they have a carte blanche to review anything on campus. They may speak to anyone while they are here, including you.

A couple of people in the audience asked whether or not Sonoma State had satisfied concerns raised at previous WASC visits including GE reform and diversity. The current reflective essays report on what we will do to address the concerns, but do not report what has been done to address these concerns. Provost Ochoa responded by saying that this is an on-going process and that we need only demonstrate progress in these areas.

The review is broken into two parts, two different ways of looking at the same things: Capacity and Preparatory Review and Educational Effectiveness. The first review answers the question, "What is the evidence that we have the capacity to teach effectively? Do we have enough resources?" and the second review answers the question, "What is the evidence that we are educationally effective?"

President Arminana told us that he has been on the WASC commission for 8 years now and that the two-step review is a new process. He said that no school has been fully reviewed under this new format, and that there are lots of questions coming in from institutions who have completed the capacity review, but not yet done the educational effectiveness review.

Sonoma State has completed its Capacity and Preparatory review portfolio for the team visit this March. SSU is scheduled for the Educational Effective Review visit in the Fall of 2009.

The ARSC team has announced that they will be holding three more WASC open forums at the beginning of the spring semester. I will keep you updated when those dates and times become available.

Jonathan T. White
whitejon@sonoma.edu