A national team representing the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) has recommended full accreditation for the School of Communications. Details…
The team found the School in compliance on all standards and praised the School’s faculty and leadership for building a collegial program with effective teaching, impressive scholarship, and strong contributions to the public good.
The favorable recommendation will be considered by the Accrediting Committee, which meets in Chicago next March. The final decision-maker will be the Accrediting Council, which meets in St. Petersburg, Fla., in May.
If the team’s recommendation stands, the School of Communications will formally become a nationally accredited program as of May 2006. At present, only 17 private colleges and universities in the world have ACEJMC-accredited communications programs, including Syracuse, Columbia, Northwestern, Miami, Southern California, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. In all, 105 colleges and universities in the world have accredited communications programs.
“I commend the School’s faculty, students and national advisory board for the concerted and thoughtful focus on quality that has brought the School of Communications to this point,” President Leo M. Lambert said.
One of ACEJMC’s expectations is that every student complete at least 80 credit hours outside the major, with 65 or more of those hours in the liberal arts and sciences.
“The ACEJMC team recognized Elon’s strength as a liberal arts university with strong professional programs,” Lambert said.
The chair of the site-visit team to Elon was Dr. Terry Hynes, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. Team members were Professor Hubert Brown of Syracuse, Dr. Jan Quarles of Middle Tennessee State, and Rich Archbold, executive editor of the Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram.
The team praised the School’s strategic planning, leadership and level of faculty governance. Based on classroom visits and four student group sessions, the team found that students are intellectually challenged in their courses and that students said “they appreciate how faculty members insist that they stretch themselves to accomplish objectives they never thought they could accomplish.” The team highlighted the faculty’s vast professional experience, its diversity, its unusually high level of collegiality, and the School’s intellectual climate.
The level of technology merited special praise, with the team writing, “To say that the School is well-stocked understates the case. The very state-of-the-art facility clearly shows that communications education is a priority of this university.”
The report also cited the School for its meaningful contributions to the public good, from an Internet Predictions Project that is generating national attention to a video series on journalists who covered the civil rights movement.
Preceding the team’s visit, the School prepared an 800-page self study that analyzed all aspects of the program. The team report said, “The self study was excellent — well organized, well written and thorough. ‘Superb’ would not be too strong a word to use in describing the Elon School of Communications self study.”