Post Classifieds
Buff State starts review process
By Katie Anderson
On October 24, 2012
In preparation for reaccreditation through the Middle States Commission on Higher Education review,
Buffalo State has been formulating a self-study assessment of the school's past ten years.
The three year process of reaccreditation, which happens every ten years, includes a report from the
school about the school's improvements, growth and overall quality, in regards to 14 standards of
excellence developed by MSCHE.
These 14 standards address topics such as the mission and goals of the college as well as leadership and
governance, institutional resources, administration, student support services, student admissions and
retention, faculty, student learning, general education and others.
"What Middle States does is it sets up 14 standards of excellence, and a self-study to address how
every campus, in our case Buffalo State, meets those 14 standards of excellence," said Rosalyn Lindner,
associate vice president of curriculum and assessment.
The self-study, due by February 1, 2013, will be sent on to peer-evaluators of MSCHE, who will then visit
the campus in order to validate the self-study. The team of nine evaluators, none of whom will be from
New York State as policy requires, is scheduled to arrive March 17, 2013, to assess the accuracy of the
self-study report, Lindner said.
"Every school has to go through a reaccreditation process that includes a self-study and a visit by a team
of people from other colleges and universities within the same area," Lindner said. "They will visit us in
the spring and be on campus for three days."
The team chair from the Middle States region, Kathleen Waldren, president of William Patterson
University, has already reviewed the rough draft of the self-study when she was recently here for a one-
day preliminary visit.
"She told us she thought the self-study was very good, and she also told us some things that we could
tweak on it to make it better," Lindner said.
Lindner along with Eric Krieg, a sociology professor, and Ralph Wahlstrom, chair of the English
department, have been collaborative leaders in developing the self-study for Buffalo State, which is
almost completed.
"It'll be 98 percent done up until the two weeks before it goes to the team," Krieg said. "Then we'll
polish it off."
"There's things that we're doing really well and there's things that we're doing okay that we could
improve on as a college," he said. "So we try to identify what those are on our own, rather than have a
visiting team point them out for us, and begin to develop ways of doing those things better."
Some areas of recommendations that are in need of better development include advising strategies,
Degree Works and a simpler plan for general education, Lindner said.
"They're not easy fixes, but we keep trying," Wahlstrom said. "That's partly what this self-study's all
about-looking to see what we do and helping us define new ways."
While Lindner oversees the entire process, Wahlstrom is the primary writer and editor of the self-study
document, who also contributes to research.
Krieg has been in charge of assembling the evidence room, the facts that back up claims made in the
document. Wahlstrom said it is the equivalent to a "work cited" page of a research paper.
Although Lindner, Krieg and Wahlstrom have played a leading role, the three-year project was not
completed only by three. About 80 people from several different departments and have contributed to
the report.
"It's a very collaborative kind of document," Krieg said. "We had eight groups of people from campus
take on certain standards. Ralph's group took on Institutional Assessment and mine took on a section
on faculty which is Standard 10."
Wahlstrom, Krieg and Lindner all said they think the visit from MSCHE will go smoothly.
"They're going to find that we're doing what we say we do," Lindner said. "Can we improve? Sure, but
everybody can."
Lindner encouraged both students and faculty to read the document, or at least the executive summary.
"This is very important to the institution," Wahlstrom said. "We're all in this together."
Katie Anderson can be reached by email at anderson.record@live.com.
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