This past summer, Southern University and A&M College (SUBR) was given a warning by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission (SACS) due to the university’s failure to meet the accrediting body’s standards of a higher education institution during their review in 2015.
SACS administered the sanction against Southern University because the university missed the needed benchmarks in relation to its faculty.
According to core requirement 2.8 in the SACS guideline handbook, “The number of full-time faculty members is adequate to support the mission of the institution and to ensure the quality and the integrity of each of its academic programs”. If SACS feels as though these issues are not corrected by the time of Southern’s next review, the university could be in jeopardy of losing its accreditation that is required for the school to offer degrees and receive federal dollars.
Interim Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Dr. Luria Young, explained that there were three programs which SACS targeted the online university for Southern Masters of Business Administration, Engineering, Science, and Computer Science, for not having a sufficient number of full-time faculty. Young explained that errors were made by the university in their review packet pertaining to how they counted their faculty.
“We have faculty that teach both the undergraduate and the graduate programs and we should have double counted those faculty but we didn’t.”
This mishap is possibly what cost the university to fall short of SACS faculty standards and Dr. Young and her staff are very confident that these issues will be addressed and fixed in the upcoming review.
“We began working on this long before it was published,” says Southern University System President-Chancellor and former SACS board member, Dr. Ray Belton.
The report in which the university failed the review was filed in 2015 and the university has been working towards revising this issue for over a year and a half.
Dr. Belton stated that in the past, it was “more cost effective to hire adjunct faculty and part-time faculty as opposed to full- time faculty because the rate of pay is different.”
Belton also noted challenges that higher education in Baton Rouge have faced due to state budget cuts, which played a role in the university not being able to meet SACS requirements. However, the issues that the university had to fix “… were more administrative fixes; I think what we had to do were more managerial things. It was not as if we didn’t have the resources,” said Belton.
These administrative issues have been addressed and the Chancellor doesn’t want students and outside the public to think the university “Just started working on it.”
Belton stated, “We have been working on it for just about a year”. The University is now focused on implementing and maintaining their recent managerial and faculty changes. SUBR has taken steps to address this issue by making many part-time faculty members full-time faculty.
Dr. Belton insisted that the sanction was nothing that the university was extremely concerned with because the issues could be fixed by making minor changes.
An academic committee, made up of administrative members, has been put in place to monitor the changes that have been implemented and to make sure they are being followed correctly.
Students will also be asked in the future to assess their courses and instructors to better student and university relations.
Dr. Belton doesn’t “anticipate any hurdle” that should garner further sanctions from the SACS committee and students should “sleep well at night” knowing that their university is handling things properly.
Southern University will send in their updated accreditation packet to SACS in the spring of 2018 and with their decision expected to be made in June, Dr. Belton reminds us all that with everything the university has implemented and addressed, “… we got this.”
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University Seeks to Remedy SACS Sanctions
September 20, 2017
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