The Board of Commissioners ("Board") intends that reports it requires of member schools constitute a dialogue between the Board and constitutive schools. These reports should contain the minimum amount of description and interpretation necessary. The goal of the preparer should be that the report provides sufficient and sufficiently clear information to avoid a follow-up action letter that seeks clarification or additional documentation.
The preparer should construct the report attentive to the context in which Commissioners will read it, namely, as one of sixty or seventy reports. Commissioners review all reports, which they have received in advance of the semi-annual Board meeting. At the meeting and in workgroups of three or four, Commissioners focus intensively on fifteen to twenty reports and make action recommendations to the whole Board in plenary session.
The introduction of the report should identify the context in which it arose, e.g., in the Board’s response to the recommendations of a comprehensive or focused visit committee or as a follow-up to an earlier report, and the specific question or questions the report addresses. The report should then set out the school’s interpretive response.
What follows is a series of the most prevalent types of reports that the Board has recently received, with suggestions as to the likely underlying concerns and how the school might frame its response. To be sure, each report is unique and depends, mutatis mutandis, upon the nature of the precise issue and the nature of the distinctive institution.
Addressing issues of planning
Lack of a strategic plan: The Board may require a sequence of reports, including the development of a planning process, the implementation of the process, and the results of the implementation of the plan. The report on the development stage would likely require fewer than five pages to describe the constitutive elements of the developmental process. The implementation report should include, in addition to the strategic plan itself, a two or three page executive summary, identifying the distinctive features of the plan and the process. Ordinarily, only the workgroup would review the detailed strategic plan. The results report should also use an executive summary to highlight the chief benefits flowing from the implementation of the plan and would likely include, as an appendix, a copy of the original strategic plan, updated to show completions, revisions, and consequences.
Typical weaknesses in strategic plans include the mirror-image deficiencies of too many details and too few details, a plan that seeks to accomplish 90 percent of its goals in the first quarter of the plan’s span, and insufficient collaboration with relevant constituencies. Each stage should describe the approval process and identify the actions taken by the appropriate agencies. Addressing issues of assessment
Lack of a comprehensive evaluation and assessment plan: The Board may require a sequence of reports, including the development of a planning process for a comprehensive assessment program, the implementation of the process, and the initial results of the implementation of the program. Rather than the lack of any sort of assessment or evaluation, the Board more often finds assessment activities that are uncoordinated and unintegrated, i.e., that are not part of a comprehensive plan designed to feed the results into the strategic planning process, or to provide the basis for improving courses and programs, or both.
Ordinarily, assessment plan reports do not require more than five pages. Unless necessary to make a particular point, specific questionnaires, raw data, and similar forms, if sent, should appear in an appendix.
Addressing issues of degree duration
The duration requirements for all degree programs measure duration in years of full-time study. The standards leave the interpretation of “full-time study” to each member school. The Board recognizes that member schools are often seeking to accommodate part-time, non-residential study to the current standards. The Board will generally look to the terms a school uses to quantify the requirements for its MDiv degree and to assume that a two-year master’s degree program should require approximately two-thirds of the quantity (courses, units, hours, etc.) of the school’s MDiv degree program. The formula seeks to take account of a required fourth year, e.g., an internship. The Board does not use the minimalist, formal definition by some schools of a “full-time student,” under which terms a “full-time student” could take four years or more to complete the school’s nominal three- year MDiv program.
If the school has designed the degree to accommodate non-traditional students, the report should show, however it configures the degree, that it ends up requiring the equivalent of two years of full-time study. In looking at a two-year, academic master’s degree program, the school should bear in mind that the standards provide an exception for these degree programs (Degree Program Standard E; cf. M.4) through which a student could complete the academic master’s degree in fewer than two years.
Based on its reviews of comprehensive and focused visits, the Board of Commissioners and staff to the Commission determined that it would be useful to provide member schools with more specific guidance about how to interpret the duration requirement specified in the degree program standards for two-year master’s programs (Degree Standard C and Degree Standard E).
The “Duration” section of both degree program standards states that the goals of the programs require two years of full-time academic work or its equivalent. The Board of Commissioners adopted a policy in January 2006 that, at a minimum, one academic year (two semesters) be understood as consisting of no fewer than 24 semester hours. Thus, a two-year master’s program would consist of at least 48 semester hours. A school may require more than 48 semester hours.
The report should provide the school’s interpretation of the audit statements. The external audit, together with any management letter and the school’s response, should accompany the interpretation as an appendix. If the issue is the elimination of deficit spending or a reduction in the endowment draw rate, the school’s narrative should review as much as has been accomplished of the following: the plan that the school has created to address the problem, the process by which the school developed and adopted the plan, the rationale by which the plan is credible, and the results of the implementation of the plan, including any conclusions and revisions flowing from the school’s assessment of the plan.
Addressing nomenclature issues
A nomenclature report addresses some variance from standard nomenclature. The Board uses the following convention for the two year master’s degree programs: Professional programs use “MA in” followed by the professional specialization, e.g., youth ministry, pastoral theology, pastoral counseling, etc. Academic programs use MA followed, in parentheses, by the concentration, e.g., biblical studies, church history, theology, etc.
The term “studies” normally characterizes an academic program.
If the school’s original nomenclature did not conform to the standard, the report should reflect the change that the school made to its nomenclature or support with substantial reasons a petition for an exception.
Addressing issues related to the size of the community of learning
The standards do not give a numeric definition of a community of learning. A dozen students in a program, however, is probably sufficient, and three is almost certainly insufficient. The school’s report should demonstrate, if necessary, how a small number of students in a particular degree program have a sense of corporate, i.e., program-specific, self-awareness and identity. The existence of a program staff and a faculty program director could be evidence that the school was seeking to remedy a temporary loss of numbers. Naming the academic dean as the program director of four MA degree programs, with a total of twelve students, that could just as easily be concentrations within a single program does not, however, create four learning communities of three students each.
The report should include a description of the ways that the school fosters a distinctive community of learning for the degree program(s) in question.
Addressing joint degree or shared credit issues
Standard M.4 describes the circumstances under which overlapping credit may be granted in joint or shared-credit degree programs. The school’s report should show how the shared credit arrangements manage the overlap. If both programs, taken independently, are of equal duration, then the duration of the shared-credit program should be at least 50 percent greater than the duration of either of the two programs. If the programs are of unequal duration, the duration of the shared-credit program should be equal to or greater than the duration of the longer program plus 50 percent of the duration of the shorter program.
Addressing library collection size and resource issues
The section of the library standard covering collections is 5.5, and it does not provide fixed numbers. Schools now have greater flexibility in the ways that they are able to meet the bibliographic resource standard, including joint and consortial collections, access to electronic collections, and negotiated access agreements. This flexibility is especially important in demonstrating that a school meets the relevant standards with regard to extension sites and distance education. With this greater flexibility, however, comes a parallel responsibility, which is, for example, that a school might need to show in its report that students at its extension sites or in its distance education programs are actually making effective use of the materials in the variety of access points that the school provides. This demonstration would be in addition to the provision of summary details with respect to agreements and budgets.
Addressing faculty workload issues
It is almost the nature of the enterprise that a reasonable person would characterize most faculty members at most member schools as overworked. The Board is generally intervening when the situation is severe or significant and prolonged or when, in the judgment of the Board, the level of overwork is having a significant impact on the ability of faculty members to teach effectively and to undertake research in support of their teaching roles. The report should demonstrate how the school tracks faculty workload, what comparisons the school makes to determine what are appropriate levels of teaching responsibilities, and the ways in which the school seeks to reduce and limit the inevitable tendency to overwork. The school, in its review, needs to be sensitive to the possibility that a nominal voluntary situation may, in fact, be mandatory if its salary levels are not sufficiently high to make a teaching overload a genuine option, rather than a necessity.
Addressing faculty, student, or staff manual issues
The Board is usually requiring a report on one or more manuals or handbooks because an evaluation committee found that an existing manual was out of date or did not exist. The report should include, as an appendix, a copy of the updated or completed manual or handbook specified, and the narrative report should recount the working and adoption process by which the school produced the manual.
Addressing DMin admissions issues
The Board is ordinarily seeking a report on the DMin degree program when there is uncertainty with respect to the way that the school is interpreting and applying the admission requirement of an MDiv degree or its equivalent or with respect to the way that the school is applying and monitoring the requirement that no more than 10 percent of the students in the program lack the requisite three years of ministerial experience subsequent to obtaining the first graduate theological degree.
Please send two copies of your petition or report single-spaced, single-sided, and unbound (to help facilitate their reproduction).