Letter to the Editor: SACS OF WHAT?

Keith M. Parsons

UHCL Professor of Philosophy

SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, is the accreditation agency for the University of Houston-Clear Lake, and many other colleges and schools.

Accreditation agencies serve a very valuable purpose.  They are the watchdogs of academe, the bodies charged with maintaining the standards of higher education.

If you want your diploma to mean something, to count for something more than a degree from the fly-by-night unaccredited schools that pop up in strip malls next to the Dollar Store, you should be grateful for accreditation agencies.

To do their job, these agencies have to be somewhat pushy and nosy. They sometimes ask tough questions and make inconvenient demands.

Administrators may understandably be a bit nervous when the accreditation people come to call.  Accreditation agencies do the job with universities that the FDA ought to be doing with egg producers.

But what if accreditation agencies begin to suffer from a grossly inflated sense of self-importance?  What if they begin to see themselves in far more grandiose terms than quality-control watchdogs?

What if they begin to make so many demands of universities that those schools, always short of cash and especially so now, have to hire new full-time personnel just to deal with those demands?

What if they demand, on pain of loss of accreditation, that universities launch massive and time-consuming new projects that have little relevance to actual academic quality?

What if the accreditation agency moves beyond its oversight role and seeks to appoint itself as an academic shadow government that issues commands that university presidents dare not disobey?

If you think that there might be anything wrong with such a scenario, welcome to the world of QEP, the pet project of SACS.

What is QEP?  “QEP” stands for “Quality Enhancement Plan.”  The Plan, roughly, is this: Entire university communities – administers, faculty, staff, and students – are to collaborate to produce a single overarching plan for quality enhancement (I’m sure the description alone thrills you).

What will the Quality Enhancement Plan accomplish, you may well ask?  Why, it will enhance quality, of course!

If you are still mystified, let’s see what the SACS people themselves say to clarify the issue:

The Quality Enhancement Plan is the component of the accreditation process that reflects and affirms the commitment of the Commission on Colleges to the enhancement of the quality of higher education and to the proposition that student learning is at the heart of the mission of all institutions of higher learning.

By definition, the QEP describes a carefully designed course of action that addresses a well-defined and focused topic or issue related to enhancing student learning. The QEP should be embedded within the institution’s ongoing integrated institution-wide planning and evaluation process and may very well evolve from this existing process or from other processes related to the institution’s internal reaffirmation review.

Say what?  Actually, I just quoted this for the enjoyment of connoisseurs of classic bureaucratic gobbledygook.  If our new bosses can’t write any better than that, should they be our bosses?

Here is what QEP really is: a crackpot scheme to impose university-wide busywork that supposedly will – in the bureaucratic lingo – “enhance student learning outcomes.”  In reality, complying with this mandate will cost our resource-strapped university a vast amount of time, effort, energy and money while doing absolutely nothing to improve the quality of anything for anybody.

How much time, effort, money, etc. will it cost?  Well, UHCL is one of many universities that must hire new full-time persons just to deal with QEP issues.  The demands of QEP are so onerous that we need that person, and I wish him or her well while deploring the fact that an accreditation agency can have the power to make such unfunded mandates.

In dollar terms, the Human Sciences and Humanities faculty were recently informed by a UHCL official that compliance with the QEP demands will cost an estimated $991,000 – a staggering sum that students will certainly help pay for with higher tuition and fees.  Refusal to comply could cost UHCL its accreditation, which would mean loss of state formula funding and federal financial aid to students.

It is appalling that in these lean times UHCL must spend such a sum on a preposterous boondoggle in response to extortions by a gang of bureaucratic bullies.

QEP is going to happen. It will take place.  None of us can stop it.  SACS is like the tiger cub you keep feeding and it gets bigger and more demanding until one day it eats you.  After we obey our SACS overlords and submit to QEP, does anyone doubt that there will be a QEP II, III, IV…?  At some point universities will have to start fighting back, and I think it should be now.  Let’s stop feeding the monster.