As part of the ongoing re-accreditation process Middle States Commission on Higher Education puts the university though on a regular basis, a team of administrators from other university’s came to review Georgetown in the last week. And according to them Georgetown is doing (almost) everything right.

Leading the review team was Rebecca Chopp, President of Swarthmore College. Chopp said at a formal reception for the team yesterday that over the past few days, she and her team met with administrators, board of directors, faculty, and students to assess how Georgetown is doing on its four goals (fun fact: President DeGioia, in his introduction, said she met with the board of directors, faculty, and administrators… that’s it). Although she had glowing praise for (almost) every aspect of the university, she did give the caveat that she wasn’t allowed to reveal her recommendations because that was the responsibility of the Middle States Commission. She advised those in attendance to “read between the lines.”

For institutional support and development, she congratulated Georgetown on its well-defined governance procedures for input from faculty and students. She further congratulated the University on its values-based planning efforts: there is a widely shared understanding on campus of what Georgetown is, and what it can become, she said.

According to Chopp, a member of the Board of Directors told her that Georgetown can be summarized by four qualities: preeminence, research, service to the global community, and responsible resource allocation. She said that administrators, faculty, and students regularly engage in conversations about planning. On a financial level, the university outperforms its resources.

For planning, Chopp did say that the University should enhance the mechanisms for information-sharing across campus, specifically in context of the Office of Institutional Support and Decision making.

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In February, the Office of the Provost released their self-study for re-accreditation. This study covered four topics: planning, resource allocation, and institutional renewal; institutional assessment; general education; and assessment of student learning. You can find the entire 108-page study here [PDF], and Vox’s coverage of the Provost’s town hall in January can be found here. The majority of the report centers around administrative and institutional practices, but there are some fun bits directly relevant to students.

Gen Eds

A huge issue tackled by the self-study is the general education requirements at Georgetown. In 2009, the standing Committee on General Education has tried to determine exactly what the goals of general education should be, and how can they assess whether those goals are being achieved by the requirements. Currently the only classes that all Georgetown undergraduates are required to take are two courses each in philosophy, theology, and humanities and writing; although, obviously each school has more requirements:

Much of the action taken on the general education requirements (including expanding the number of courses that satisfy the humanities and writing requirement) is a response to the 2007 Intellectual Life report, which basically said that the gen eds exist in their current form because no one bothered to change them in the past 60 years. Through the General Education Working Group the study says that the gen eds “ought to be a visible and distinct aspect of the Georgetown experience (p46).”

However the committee also found that both faculty and students tend to be confused as to their purpose: although most students cite well-roundedness and cura personalis as the rationale for the requirements, there is no consensus. The committee did outline some themes of how general education should function, and how people have been reporting it to function:

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On Wednesday evening, President John DeGioia held his biannual conversation with campus media. Over the hour-long discussion, DeGioia discussed a wide variety of subjects, including the capital campaign, the campus plan, campus safety, Georgetown’s major construction projects, diversity initiatives, and the University’s international programs. Next week, the Voice will offer complete analysis of President DeGioia’s press conference.

Before taking questions, the president reflected on the broad themes of his fall semester:

“It was a great fall, I just think we had a terrific fall. For me, it was kind of driven by a couple of big things. We had to launch the public phase of the campaign. That was really quite an extraordinary weekend for us. It was us at our best and I was glad we were able to have such an inclusive experience with so many, including the big tent on the front lawn. Our fundraising success has continued very well, we’re over the halfway mark in the campaign, at the halfway mark. We feel very encouraged by the generosity of our community. We’re just going to keep at it, our highest priority is scholarships, support for financial aid. Given the challenging nature of the economy I don’t think we could have a more important priority- that priority emerged over roughly 8 years of planning going back to 2003, but certainly characterized all of the years of our quiet phase- that was our most dominant priority. We actually went out publicly with that priority in the quiet phase in a series of town halls across the country, where I talked about what we call the 1789 Scholarship Imperative, which is our way of characterizing the financial aid piece.

I think there were other issues that dominated my time- the relationship with the community and our engagement in the city was part of that. This is our cycle, to submit our campus plan and we’ve completed our public hearing on November 17th. And we have our final filing of documents this Friday, and on February 9th we have a read-out from the Board of Zoning where they think they’re going to come down in terms of the conditions for Georgetown, and we’ll expect some time later this spring, maybe mid-April, maybe May, that will be our expectation that we’ll get a written report, and that will give us a sense of the position of the Board of Zoning. But I think as you know, this was a three-year effort, but also really it’s not a episodic experience, it really is a full immersion for ten years with deep engagement with the community and lots of conversation. It just becomes particularly focused in roughly the final two years of that ten-year period where you deeply engage in the formal submission of documents to various city agencies and the like. So we went through that.

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In an interview with campus media yesterday, University President John DeGioia discussed Georgetown’s approaching re-accreditation process, for which the University has been preparing for over a year. DeGioia commented on the “intense experience” that re-accreditation is for the University:

We go through a formal accreditation this spring, and we do that every ten years. The chair of our visiting team was here in November, was here for a two-day visit, and the whole team will come on the first of April, and so we’re looking forward to that. I have some experience being in that role- I’ve chaired two accrediting teams in the last three years. I chaired the accreditation last year for Villanova University and the year before that Harvard University. So these are intense experiences, whether you’re on the visiting team or the university being visited. We’re ready and we’re looking forward to it.

Earlier in the evening, Associate Provost Marjory Blumenthal and Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson hosted a town-hall meeting to present and discuss findings from the university’s self-study for their upcoming re-accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

The self-study focused on four areas: planning, institutional assessment, general education, and assessment of student learning.

In regards to planning, Blumenthal said that Georgetown has no singular strategic planning document, which made assessment more difficult. Instead of one document, Georgetown expressed its mission and values in the planning and executions of its initiatives. Recently the university has been collecting more data to support its planning, according to Blumenthal. For instance, Chief Operating Officer Christopher Augostini uses the Hoya Roundtables and Hoya Innovation to collect data for the departments under his watch. Also, the university has a new Office of Assessment and Decision Support headed by Michael McGuire to help institutional analysis of administrative planning.

Speaking of, under institutional assessment, the steering committee assessed the university in terms of several key themes. The first theme was strengthening the university’s research profile, which is distinct from peer institutions. For example, most of the university’s federally-funded research comes from the Medical Center, and a large portion of the other research centers concern policy and inter-religious understanding.

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DeGioia’s reaction upon hearing of the hot breakfast outrage

Beyond the significant commitments of the raising money from donors, guiding the university and coping with rogue freshmen, it seems Georgetown President John DeGioia has yet another obligation on his plate: leading the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ re-accreditation committee for Harvard.

That’s right, we may not be in the Ivy League, but our President gets to judge (or “holistically evaluate”) them!

According the the Harvard Crimson, though, he won’t necessarily get a warm welcome when he goes up on research trips.  DeGioia and the re-accreditation committee held a meeting this Monday to get input from Harvard students.  The student turnout? A grand total of five.