AAUP-UD Provides Input on UD’s Self-Study for Middle States Accreditation

Since 2019, seven working groups at UD have been researching and drafting a self-study to present to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education as part of UD’s re-accreditation process. In order to be accredited, an institution is judged by seven standards, and each of the working groups was assigned one standard upon which to focus and report. A draft of these reports was collated by the steering committee and submitted for comment by UD constituencies in spring 2020, updated after the onset of the pandemic, and re-released for comment on May 1, 2021. The AAUP-UD recently submitted written comments on reports on three of the standards, including Standard I,

Mission and Goals; Standard II, Ethics and Integrity; and Standard VI, Planning, Resources, and Institutional Improvement. You can read the AAUP-UD’s comments in their entirety here. Here is a brief summary of them:

Standard 2.5: Faculty now have little input into administrative searches, a change from past practice. Thesesearches are opaque and overly reliant on the work of external search firms.

Standard 6.3: The University’s previous budget model, called RBB, was widely disliked for its lack of fairnessand transparency. President Assanis set the model aside, and a new one has not yet been finalized. In atimely fashion, the administration should articulate its model clearly and transparently, and this modelshould offer significant improvements on the last one.

The AAUP-UD has not yet received acknowledgment of its comments but hopes that they will be given dueconsideration by the working groups and the steering committee in the final version of the self-study.