THE TWO-YEAR TRACK

Guidelines Vs. Requirements

Some regional accrediting agencies have relaxed their standards for faculty credentials at two-year colleges — or have they?

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By ROB JENKINS

What's the difference between a guideline and a requirement? Not much, if the "guideline" is enforced like a requirement.

Yet that semantic distinction was the subject of several e-mail messages and phone calls I received after my last column on teaching credentials at community colleges (The Chronicle, June 20). One of the calls came from Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS, Commission on Colleges.

Wheelan took issue with my characterization of SACS "guidelines" (her word) as "requirements" (my word) — specifically, the so-called 18-hour rule.

Here's the key passage from my June column: "Generally speaking, to teach in programs that award associate of arts or associate of science degrees — i.e., to teach at a community college — faculty members are required by accreditors to have at least a master's degree and a minimum of 18 graduate credit hours in the subject they are teaching."

According to Wheelan, "that's just not true." In 2002, she said, the regional accrediting agency abandoned the 80 or so "must" statements it had previously used to assess institutional compliance in favor of about 40 broad-based "principles."

"Of course, institutions can still use the 18-hour rule if they want to, but they're no longer required to do so," she told me. She went on to say that SACS, like other accrediting agencies around the country, has relaxed its standards for evaluating faculty credentials.

"If you have a banker, for instance, who doesn't necessarily have the academic credentials but has successfully run a business for 20 years, an institution could probably make a good case to justify that person's teaching an intro-to-business course," Wheelan said.

Obviously, that sort of flexibility would represent a welcome change from the way SACS and other accreditors have done business in the past. Because the case Wheelan describes involving the banker is exactly the kind of situation I dealt with repeatedly when I was a department chairman: people who were clearly qualified to teach specific courses by any rational definition of the word but who could not be certified and hired because they did not meet the strict academic requirements for the job.

Of course, I was a chairman before the reforms Wheelan mentioned, or at least before word of those reforms filtered down to the campuses. So I'm not by any means questioning the literal veracity of her statements. Nor do I have a death-wish-like desire to antagonize SACS — the organization that accredits my own institution, which has another review coming up in 2011.

But in the interests of my readers, who are grappling with very practical questions like "Am I qualified to teach X at community college Y?" I have to point out a few problems with her distinction between requirements and guidelines.

The first is that, whatever the accreditors may say, people at two-year colleges nationally are still dealing with confusing and seemingly contradictory credentials problems. Many of them e-mailed their horror stories to me about being denied the opportunity to teach at a two-year college because they were judged unqualified — based on the 18-hour rule and other such "guidelines."

One correspondent, for instance, has been unable to get a job teaching statistics at community colleges in his home state because college administrators — and by extension, he assumes, the regional accrediting agency (not SACS) — require faculty members in a math department to have a degree in mathematics. At most two-year colleges, statistics courses are taught in the math department and have a "MAT" prefix. Unfortunately for the job candidate, all the courses in his Ph.D. program in statistics had "STAT" prefixes. So, under the 18-hour guideline, he has been deemed unqualified to teach in a community-college math department.

Another correspondent is pursuing a degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages but has been told she can't teach freshman composition courses.

Perhaps the reason for such mindless nitpicking is simply, as Wheelan suggested, that news of the new, more flexible guidelines hasn't gotten out. Or maybe the problem is that, while the standards themselves have become more flexible, the people applying them — administrators and site-visit team members — haven't.

(Note: the "site-visit team" is a group of faculty members and administrators from other institutions assigned by an accrediting agency to review an institution's accreditation.)

In the case of SACS, the new guidelines, although welcome, still seem sufficiently open to interpretation to create confusion among job applicants as well as disparity among institutions. Here's the revised statement on credentials for faculty members at two-year colleges, taken from the SACS Web site and dated December 2006:

"Institutions should use the following as credential guidelines. … Faculty teaching associate degree courses designed for transfer to a baccalaureate degree: doctorate or master's degree in the teaching discipline or master's degree with a concentration in the teaching discipline (a minimum of 18 graduate semester hours in the teaching discipline)."

Honestly, how much difference do you see between that language and what I wrote in my last column?

Another potential problem is evident in Wheelan's example of the banker who might be able to teach business courses. Remember how she put it? An institution "could probably make a good case to justify that person's teaching."

In other words, if a candidate does not meet the credential guidelines cited above — essentially, still the 18-hour rule — then the onus is on the institution to justify hiring that person.

That's fine, so long as the college has both gutsy department chairs who will argue for unorthodox candidates and open-minded administrators who will see the logic in those arguments. Realistically, though, how many institutions does that last sentence describe? More to the point, how many colleges will go to the trouble of trying to make a case for someone who doesn't exactly fit the profile, especially if other candidates do?

The truth is, some two-year colleges might hire that banker as an adjunct if they just need someone to teach an intro-to-business course. But very few would hire him or her full-time, much less on the tenure track.

As a practical matter, then, those who want to pursue faculty careers at two-year colleges are most likely to be successful if — as I said in my last column — they make sure they have at least a master's degree with a minimum of 18 graduate-semester hours in the teaching discipline. (A few minutes spent perusing the job listings in The Chronicle for positions at community colleges will, I think, bear out that conclusion.)

In all fairness, SACS and other regional accrediting agencies deserve credit for their attempts to streamline, liberalize, and demystify the credentialing process. More power to Wheelan, in particular, who described herself as a "one-woman crusade to get the word out" about her organization's more-flexible new guidelines. Let's hope she's successful, and that administrators as well as and those reviewing credentials get the memo.

Until then, prospective faculty members at two-year colleges can save themselves a lot of headaches by interpreting "guideline" as "requirement."

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College. He writes occasionally for our community-college column.

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