Education Commons^™

Institutional Accreditation: Making The Process More Efficient, Effective, And Meaningful To Colleges And Universities, Cynthia J. Requa

Ed.D. Dissertations in Practice

Institutional accreditation is a voluntary, peer-review process that is overseen through the seven institutional accreditors governed by the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of accreditation is to ensure institutional quality standards are being met by colleges and universities. The purpose of this study was to identify how the accreditation process could be improved with foci on efficiency, effectiveness, and more meaningful impact to the institutions. Drawing on Heifetz et al.’s (2009) theory of adaptive leadership, Kotter’s (2012) accelerators and the integrated planning principles of Stephens (2017) and Immordino et al., (2016), this study employed grounded theory to discover the …

Closing Up Shop: Meditations On The Departmental/Programmatic Elimination Experience, Susan Beth Donoff

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Departmental and programmatic eliminations represent a new paradigm in the history of American higher education. Hastened by a national economic recession and competing state funding priorities, public post-secondary institutions have turned to academic attrition as a solution to continuous budgetary shortfalls. As a means of addressing the lived experience of faculty members and department chairs, the following qualitative case study explores perceptions of implementing departmental and/or programmatic eliminations.

Utilizing uncertainty reduction theory as a conceptual framework, interviewed faculty in saved units experienced considerable strategic uncertainty, failing to understand why they had been selected for elimination. Guided by a college-wide strategic …