By Matt Reed. Next week I’m doing my first accreditation visit. I’ve been on the receiving end of three ten-year visits in my career - you’d think that wouldn’t be mathematically possible, but it is - but this will be my first time on the visiting side. I spent a chunk of this weekend plowing through the self-study, pen in hand. Already, I can see the value in it as a professional development exercise.  The college I’m visiting is in a different state than my own, so it has a different set of political variables to manage. It has its own history, its own local quirks, and its own challenges. Yet much of what it’s facing is simply a variation on what nearly everybody in public higher education is facing. And that’s where the professional development value comes in.
Unless you make a conscious effort not to, it’s easy for people on a given campus to think that its issues are unique to it. That’s true because most of the time, most people on campus aren’t made privy to, or interested in, comparative perspectives. They’re too busy focusing on their own work - to their credit - and it’s easier just to assume that whenever someone in administration makes some sort of reference to an external force, it’s just cover for a personal agenda. But much of the time, it isn’t.  And that becomes really obvious when you look beyond a single campus. Read more...