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accreditation

Date: May 20, 2011

To: The Wesleyan Community

From: Rob Rosenthal, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

Subject: Wesleyan's Reaccreditation Process

Welcome to Wesleyan's "Accreditation Central" website! 
Please read the draft outline of the self-study and post your comments about how to tell Wesleyan's story as we develop this into a 100-page document.  Our goal is for this to be a collaborative process.  We want every member of the Wesleyan community to be part of this process, to have a voice in the work of deciding what to highlight about the last ten years in Wesleyan's history. 

Collaboration
We invite you to participate in the accreditation process by:

  • Posting comments about each draft, section by section, of the self-study here.
  • Attending community forum meetings on the accreditation process
  • Attending a WESeminar on our accreditation process 

Steps in the process
We envision the following process and timeline. For a more detailed timeline, click here.

  1. Raw draft of the initial outline is posted for feedback.  At this stage, your feedback can have a significant effect as the process is most flexible.  The goal for posting these raw outlines is to make sure the community's input informs the document from the beginning. Posting date: May 20, 2011.
  2. Rough narrative draft posted for feedback; this draft includes community feedback from the raw draft stage and is the first iteration written in narrative (rather than outline) form.  It will be posted for additional feedback in fall 2011.   
  3. Polished draft: this will be the penultimate draft, which will incorporate the community feedback from the rough draft stage. This is the last opportunity for community feedback to be incorporated into the self-study, and at this point we hope that each of us -- faculty, students, staff, alumni, and parents -- will have engaged this process in some way. This draft will be posted in spring 2012.  
  4. The Self-Study as submitted: this final version is due in summer 2012. It will be posted here as soon as we submit it to our accreditation agency, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). 
  5. Campus visit by the Visiting Committee: a team of faculty and administrators from our peer institutions will visit Wesleyan beginning September 30, 2012.  They will meet with students, faculty, librarians, staff, and trustees, to evaluate Wesleyan and compare what they see on campus with what was said in the self-study. 

 

About accreditation
Wesleyan undergoes reaccreditation every ten years, with a mid-cycle review each five-year point in between. For this process, we write a 100-page self-study and then host a visit to campus by a committee of faculty and administrators from peer schools who review us in the context of our self-study. To prepare for this, twelve committees of Wesleyan faculty, staff, and students have been developing drafts of our self-study, for community input. Additional committees are working on plans for engaging the community, collecting data, steering the overall process, and polishing drafts.    

 

Thank you for reading these drafts and posting comments -- the self-study will be better with your input.