“Because we did everything right up to the moment that SACS was going to come to our campus, we’re in a really excellent position to be able to go through consolidation.” -Raymond Whiting
New consolidation delays visit from SACS.
With the consolidation of Augusta State Uni- versity and Georgia Health Sciences University, Augusta State will no longer be visited by SACS in March, which means that a Quality Enhancement Plan is no longer required, according to Wesley Kisting, assistant professor in the Department of English and Foreign Language and director of the QEP. However, Augusta State still has plans for the future of the KNIT program.
“The QEP we developed called Knowledge Integrated, or KNIT for short, is going to move forward,” Kisting said. “(It will be) fully funded for the full five-year term as a university initiative. So, its status has changed, but our intention to implement it and its’ basic design have not. Basically, what that means is, we’re moving forward with it because we now see it as an excellent idea worth implementing and worth funding, but not because SACS requires it for us to be reaccredited.”
The consolidation of the two universities cancels out the reaffirmation process Augusta State was about to go through.
“ASU is no longer getting reaffirmed as ASU, we’re moving directly to the consolidation phase, which operates by a different set of guidelines, so SACS doesn’t require a QEP under those guidelines,” Kisting said.
Raymond Whiting, professor of political science and associate vice president for institution effectiveness, said the ruling for the original visit would have never been done and going through the accreditation did not make sense. One reason was financial because site visits cost around $32,000 to $36,000.
After this decision, a letter was sent for a one year delay on the reaccreditation visit until Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State are fully merged. Also, a new prospectus, which outlines the plan for the new university, will be created for the Commission on Colleges to look at.
“Right now because we did everything right up to the moment that SACS was going to come to our campus, we’re in a really excellent position to be able to go through consolidation,” Whiting said. “Georgia Health Sciences University went through their full reaffirmation last year, we were prepared this year. Both institutions have already gone through (the process), we have all the data, we have all the information, we’re well prepared.”
Being prepared included having a QEP in place, but now it is not required by SACS, Kisting said. The reason for this is because of the consolidation, and the univeristies have not had a chance to evaluate the learning problems of the students at both schools because they have not yet combined into one institution.
“The deficiencies our students have here (at Augusta State) might not be the same as the deficiencies they have down there,” Kisting said. “To ask two institutions to go through that rigorous self-assessment before they even become one makes no sense. The simpler way to put it is consolidation resets the SACS clock or time-frame, so we almost certainly will be asked to do a QEP in future reaffirmations, but probably not in the next five years after we’ve consolidated. But five years after we’ve consolidated, then probably we’ll be back to the normal reaffirmation process where you do have to have a QEP.”
Where Augusta State is concerned, they do not want to waste the idea and wait five years to implement the QEP, Kisting said. So, they are taking this former requirement and adding it to the curriculum.
“We don’t want to abandon a good idea just because we are no longer required to implement it,” Kisting said. “The reason it began as a plan that everyone was serious about implementing because they wanted to improve student learning. So that intention has not changed just because are not going to be reaccredited by SACS or because we’re not going to stay ASU.”
Besides it being a good idea, Kisting said another reason it was decided to continue with the KNIT program is because of the support it received from the faculty and administration at Augusta State and GHSU.
“The leadership at Georgia Health Sciences University has heard about the plan and essentially agreed this is a good plan that benefits everybody because it strengthens our core curriculum,” Kisting said. “So, they understand the costs that we predict for the plan, they understand that the faculty has bought into the plan here. They realize that some of their faculty may want to participate in this plan, although we teach most of the core. They’ve expressed several times their commitment in making sure it’s implemented and funded for five years.”
Some of the faculty at Augusta State was hesitant about the initiative because other initiatives have come and gone before, Kisting said. But the leadership is serious about this program and its implementation.
“I think this is the perfect signature program for the new university we are becoming,” Kisting said. “It’s a commitment to improving the core curriculum experience that will appeal to lots of colleges and universities nationwide. It’s a very simple, very affordable and I think a very well thought out strategy for making sure that students see stronger connections between their core classes, learn a little better what some of the personal and interpersonal benefits of knowledge are and will also build a much stronger sense of campus community, which is something that both of our institutions will benefit from in the long term.”
While the KNIT program is being implemented, the merger is also moving along and to keep it moving, there is a consolidation steering committee consisting of 21 people, which has community members and people from both institutions with staff, faculty and student representatives. There is also a consolidation action team beneath it, Whiting said, which consists of eight people and four from each university. However, the community members within the consolidation groups did not get picked because of any business or financial affiliation.
“They’re not there representing the bank,” Whiting said. “They’re there representing a member of the community who has been involved in education. So, they’re individuals who have been a member of our foundation or a member of the foundation down at GHSU or have been active in supporting the university in another way.”
During this process with the consolidation groups, steps have already been made to make this merger a reality. Ricardo Azziz, president of Georgia Health Sciences University, spoke for about 20 minutes at the Augusta State University faculty meeting Thursday, March 8, about the mission statement, vision and values for the new university.
A new mission statement, vision and values are required by SACS to accredit the new university, Azziz said. These statements show SACS the new university has a plan for the future. It was created by group effort, with little involvement from the two presidents.
“Dr. Bloodworth and I had the least input into that,” Azziz said. “It really had to do with the group and again the group is partly the working group that has been appointed by the chancellor and there is a staff group that prepares material for that working group of the chancellor.”
The mission statement, which is broad and descriptive, is longer than traditional mission statements because it covers the consolidation of the two universities, Azziz said.
The vision statement, however, is shorter than the mission statement, but revealed a large vision for the new university. For writing the values, Azziz said since many of the values between the two universities were similar, and it was fairly simple for the group to write the seven values, which are collaboration, compassion, excellency, inclusivity, integrity, leadership and scholarship.
“We want to be a destination, we want to be a place where students come here and say ‘I want to go to Augusta to train,’” Azziz said. “You want to have a place that patients say ‘I want to go to Augusta to have my care’ and that’s the vision. We want to be world-class, we don’t really want to say well we want to be as good as our neighboring institution or we want to just as good as our counterparts across the state, we want to be world-class.”