Campus set for site visit
By Crystal Forester
Staff Reporter

Getting the list of site visitors’ names from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools so close to the visit may cause minor scheduling inconveniences, but will have no negative affects on TCU’s reaccreditation process, Bonnie Melhart, director of the SACS self-study, said Tuesday.

With little time to spare, the TCU self-study committee must prepare for the campus visit late February, Melhart said. The site visitors are usually picked at least four to six weeks before the scheduled visit, Melhart said.

“Getting the list later makes it a little harder for us to schedule interviews,” Melhart said. “Their are 18 people who want to meet with the same 50 to 60 people.”

Gerald Lord, executive director for SACS, said the list came later than expected because some of the original people became ill or had unavoidable scheduling conflicts.

Melhart said she sent the self-study report and other necessary information to visitors when she received the list of names Monday.

“We sent out a request for the site visitors to request the people they would like to interview while they are here,” Melhart said.

Lord said he selects the volunteers for the site visits from a pool of 4,000 people, who are nominated by faculty, administration and presidents of the institutes they represent, he said.

The visitors are broken up into sections by the self-study report to review the area they are assigned, Melhart said. She said they can request to speak with a variety of university members including students, faculty, staff and possibly alumni, Melhart said.

The committee members may ask to interview a certain person by name or a person in a certain program or organization, she said.

“Their sole task is to evaluate their areas and send a report back to SACS,” Melhart said. “The visitors will speak to roughly 50 to 60 people trying to complete their task.”

Melhart said the agenda for the site visitors is extremely full. In the mornings and early afternoons they will be touring campus and conducting interviews while at night they will write their own set of reports to turn into SACS regional accrediting body, she said.

Melhart said the site visitors are from other private university with the same church affiliation and size as TCU. They will be selected from 11 states in the southern region of the United States, she said.

The visitors will not be from anywhere in Texas since the committee members will become familiar with many aspects of the university, Lord said.

“The committee will get to know some of the internal workings of the schools and we don’t want to give those to a competing institute,” Lord said.

Once the committee is selected, SACS must arrange plane tickets and hotel accommodations for the site visitors, Lord said. The institute that the committee is visiting will be responsible for scheduling interviews and tours of the campus, he said.

TCU will provide the committee members with transportation to and from the Worthington Hotel in downtown Fort Worth, Melhart said. The committee will also have a workroom in the Student Center, where the self-study report will be available to them, she said.

The Commission on Colleges will meet in December to make a final decision about reaffirming TCU’s accreditation, Lord said.

Before the decision can be made, TCU must show that it is working to make changes recommended by the site visitors, Melhart said.

Crystal Forester
c.m.forester@tcu.edu