By Eric Lippe, Magazine Editor
Gettysburg College recently published its Self-Study Report Draft for feedback from the campus community. The College hopes to gain feedback before the document is submitted to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) during 2024’s accreditation review.
According to an email sent out to the college community on Oct. 22, the report was compiled by over sixty students, staff, faculty and administrators and was led by the steering committee co-chairs associate professor of anthropology Amy Evrard and professor of management Christopher Zappe.
Zappe explained what the report is designed to communicate to MSCHE: “…who we are, what we are, what our strengths are, and what our opportunities for growth are.”
According to Evrard and Zappe, MSCHE requires that all colleges and universities under their jurisdiction must be reviewed every ten years to ensure that they are upholding requirements related to MSCHE’s standards.
Under MSCHE’s 13th edition of their Standards For Accreditation and Requirements of Affiliation, the seven major items are missions and goals; ethics and integrity; design and delivery of the student experience; support of the student experience; educational effectiveness assessment; planning, resources and institutional improvement; and governance, leadership and administration.
Both Zappe and Evrard emphasized that the concern of the report had less to do with if the college’s accreditation would be reaffirmed and focused more on making sure that the college excels in the areas it claims to.
“If you’re going to claim to be a first-class institution of liberal arts, you really need to be able to demonstrate that you, that students, are actually learning,” said Zappe.
Evrard went on to point out that this report has been an excellent time to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the institution. The report is primarily focused on the last decade of the college’s performance.
“That’s the theme—that we’ve done a lot, and we’re really proud of what we’ve done– but we also need to assess and adjust and make changes for areas that maybe didn’t completely fulfill the goals we had for them or need further improvement,” said Evrard.
According to the email sent to the campus community, the draft of the report has been made available in order to better ensure that more voices are heard and more perspectives are reflected in the report before it makes its way into MSCHE’s process.
“We want to see if all the campus constituencies agree that this is an accurate vision of the college as a whole or if there are other things they feel aren’t included in the report that they would like to see or something like that”, said Evrard. “We’d love for [students] to particularly read an area that’s of special interest to them and give feedback. Even for them to skim through the whole thing and get a sense of what this institution is and how it functions for their success, it could be really affirming to them.”
Evrard went on to describe the accreditation process after the self-study report is completed: “…we’ll turn the report in, we’ll have a peer evaluation team comprising of experts from other—probably mostly colleges in this kind of institution—and they’ll come to campus in March and spend the next three or four days meeting with people, going over the report, going over the evidence. Then they all prepare a report, will respond to the report, and then the report will go to Middle States, the accrediting agency, and they’ll make a determination as to whether we pass accreditation or if we have to make some changes before we can pass accreditation or something like that.”
Zappe expanded on the importance of explaining this process to the campus community.
“I think that it’s important to emphasize that this process is people that are not working in Middle States. It’s like it’s not we’re taking them out of a special place. We’re talking about people who might be at Dickinson or F&M or whatever institution,” Zappe said. “What’s happening is peers are coming and saying, ‘Wow, this looks really interesting. This is working out really nicely. Well, have you ever thought about this?’”
According to the MSCHE’s website, Gettysburg College was among the first institutions accredited by MSCHE.
Evrard concluded the interview by reiterating the steering committee’s openness to hearing from the campus community and students in particular.
“We would really welcome all feedback, all questions, anything that can help us improve the report or just improve the way we address certain issues,” said Evrard.
Evrard and Zappe requested that feedback from the campus community be directed to their emails: aevrard@gettysburg.edu and czappe@gettysburg.edu. They shared that there will be an open forum to discuss the self-study report hosted over Zoom on Wednesday, Nov. 1 from 12 to 1 p.m.
