It’s been almost two years in the making, but today we submit the completed Assurance Argument to the Higher Learning Commission in order to maintain our status as an accredited institution of higher learning. The completed file is 33,839 words long and comes with a massive file of supporting documents. These supporting documents include ten years of financial statements, meeting minutes from all of the most prominent faculty committees, a litany of strategic planning documents, all of the handbooks and catalogs that we use, and a host of other copies of emails, memos, spreadsheets, data summaries, and who knows what else. If that weren’t enough, we also submitted over 1,300 pages of documents to show that we’ve met the long list of federal compliance standards.
So after months of writes, rewrites, edits, re-edits, a couple of start-overs, and even a re-rewrite (and way too much wordsmithing – we are academics and we can’t help ourselves!), we have declared it to be done. Sometimes its entirely appropriate to celebrate selfishly. And for the IR office and Academic Affairs, this is just such a day. Yahoo! Zero more days of HLC assurance arguing!
Of course, there is no way that one office or one committee could possibly put all of this together. Many of you contributed to this project by writing parts of these documents, finding evidence of a change that Augustana made at some point in the last ten years, editing big parts or small sections of these documents, identifying further evidence that might bolster an argument or better answer a question, or just reading over various parts of the text and telling us that things looked pretty good from your point of view.
Please accept a gigantic thank you on behalf of myself and all of us who’ve been consumed with this project for the last six months.
Lastly, there is no way that this project would look anything like it’s final iteration if it weren’t for Kimberly Dyer. Many of you know Kimberly already and know that she is the main reason why the IR office is able to pull off all of the things that we do. She spent countless hours writing, editing, researching, and scouring the backwaters of our computer drives and servers for just the right documentation to go into the Assurance Argument. She also kept an amazingly complicated record of all the evidence items that were needed, requested, found, missing, entered, and ultimately linked in the text.
Next month (October 19 and 20 to be exact), a team of external reviewers will come to Augustana to follow up with us, ask additional questions of faculty, administrators, staff, and students, and conduct their due diligence to complete the process of the HLC accreditation cycle. You’ll see a lot more information about that visit as we get closer to it, no doubt. But for now, I just wanted to give everyone who contributed to creating the Assurance Argument a big shout out. And if you see Kimberly around campus this week, don’t hesitate to applaud, bow, thank, or express gratitude in whatever way you choose. She deserves it.
Oh . . . what’s that? You say you’d like to read the whole thing? Really??? I believe that the entire file will still be available on the HLC site if you want to use the login and password that we set up last spring for anyone who wanted to review it. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll find a way to get you a copy of the final documents. In the meantime, revel in the fact that no one is going to ask you to write an accreditation document for the long while!
Make it a good day,
Mark