The Walter Cronkite School will undergo evaluations Monday and Tuesday to renew its accreditation as a journalism school, an inspection by a five-member council that will consist of a series of meetings with students, classroom observations, a review of faculty and curriculum and a meeting with President Michael Crow.
A team from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC) consisting of five journalists and journalism educators will sit in on classes and meet with students Monday and Tuesday to review the school’s progress over the last six years.
In 2005, during its last review, the Cronkite School nearly missed being awarded full accreditation due to transitional complications.
The accreditation team will meet with groups of students representing the different journalism specializations over the two days. The team will meet with a group representing graduate students on Monday and will meet with a group representing all undergraduate students on Tuesday.
Cronkite student leaders have asked students to attend the meetings. Matt Culbertson, president of ASU’s chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America, has spread the word among public relations students and hopes for a good turnout.
“I want to get across that my experience has been really positive,” Culbertson said. “I think most people’s experiences have been positive. I’m really in support of what Dean (Christopher) Callahan and all of the faculty have done.”
Culbertson said he thinks the Cronkite School’s emphasis on professional skills will impress the accreditation team.
“I think the Cronkite School’s model of focusing on practical, real world skills is exactly what a journalism school should be following — focusing on new media, multimedia and entrepreneurship,” he said. “I’m biased, but I think we’re doing it better than anyone else.”
While evaluating the school the team will compile a report of about 50 pages reviewing various aspects of the faculty and curriculum. The team will meet with President Crow on Wednesday to go over the entire report.
The ACEJMC accredits 113 colleges, schools, divisions and departments. Schools are re-accredited every six years. One year in advance, the school prepares a self-study to submit to the ACEJMC before the accreditation process begins.
Accreditation teams vary in number between three and seven members according to the size of school, and are led by a dean or former dean of another school. The Cronkite School will host a group of five led by Richard Cole, former dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After the accreditation team evaluates the school, it sends its report to the ACEJMC Accreditation Council, which then sends it to the smaller Accreditation Committee for a final judgment.
Cronkite School Dean Christopher Callahan has served on accreditation teams in the past and is also on the Accreditation Council, but he will not participate in the council during the Cronkite School’s accreditation.
Callahan said although the accreditation team cannot rank or grade specifically how good a school is, he is excited to see what they think of the school’s progress.
“I’ve actually been excited about this, even though it’s been a lot of work,” Callahan said. “The idea of an external group coming in and validating what we’ve been doing for the last five or six years is actually very exciting.”
The ACEJMC judges schools based on nine standards: Mission, Governance and Administration; Curriculum and Instruction; Diversity and Inclusiveness; Full-Time and Part-Time Faculty; Scholarship; Student Services; Resources, Facilities and Equipment; Professional and Public Service; and Assessment of Learning Outcomes.
In 2005, the Cronkite School was nearly given provisional accreditation, which would require the school to undergo the same process a year later, after failing two of the nine standards of accreditation. That recommendation by the accreditation team was overruled by the Accreditation Council.
“The school was never provisionally accredited, (it) always had the full accreditation,” Callahan said. “But it does point out that there were some significant problems six years ago.”
One failed standard was governance.
The school was transitioning; Director Douglas Anderson had left in 1999 to become dean of the journalism school at Pennsylvania State University and Joe Foote had taken his place. But the Cronkite School was preparing to become an independent college with Callahan as the dean.
The move to its current location in downtown Phoenix may have also contributed to the sense of disorder.
“They were saying, ‘These people think they can move downtown and build a whole new building and move a whole school to downtown Phoenix, to a campus that doesn’t even exist yet,’” Callahan said. “The way I read that is, they were a little skeptical about that.”
But Callahan said that in retrospect, the move was clearly a good idea and brought the school to “a far superior facility” in its current building.
Diversity was the other failed standard.
Since 2005 the Cronkite School has increased the diversity of its student body, faculty and curriculum, Callahan said. For example, Journalism Ethics and Diversity was created as a required course. High school diversity outreach programs have also been put in place.
Callahan said the Cronkite School’s progress in all areas in the last six years should impress the accreditation team, citing first-place finishes in the Hearst Awards and the Society of Professional Journalists intercollegiate news contest.
“At the end of the day, they’re trying to evaluate the quality of the journalism education at the institution,” Callahan said. “The good news for us is — and I think this self-study bears this out with a lot of data — that this has become one of the very best professional journalism schools in the country.”
Contact the reporter at john.l.fitzpatrick@asu.edu
