This week is crucial to the University because accreditors from the Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges and Universities will be visiting our classes, roaming our halls, checking our laboratories, reading our papers, looking at the documentation of our University’s activities, and talking with students, faculty, and administrators.
Our students are told to recite actively in classes that suddenly have less absentee students and faculty, and our student and administrative services operate at their peak. All of a sudden, everything seems unusually transparent in the University’s chase after level IV accreditation.
This is an admirable drive; rather, it is a necessary drive, given that where we were once the only university in the country to be granted level IV accreditation, we have been left far behind by better-accredited peers.
But what is the purpose of a PAASCU accreditation?
A PAASCU re-accreditation recognizes a university for what it is, in terms of its student services, its teaching and curriculum, its library and resources, its plant and physical facilities, as well as the goals which drive the entire academic institution.
It should be a picture of how our University is, so that the accreditors could give necessary recommendations to improve our processes, systems and the like.
But for members of the community to go at such lengths to project an image of excellence may no longer an act of putting the best foot forward.
After all, how else can one assess the act of professors giving the class a syllabus prepared especially for the request of PAASCU accreditors, instead of using the class’ regular syllabus?
We have, in a way, crossed the border between good hosts who truly want a fair and reliable accreditation to one that only focuses on the bottom line—level IV accreditation.
After all, why do students need to be reminded to go to class on time and not be absent, to actively engage professors in discussion, even get advance readings from professors where these very basic actions are supposed to be instinctive for students of a world-class university, PAASCU or no?
A world-class university need not remind its students to attend class or to participate actively. A world-class university should instead focus on building real value in the academe, student life and in education through independent and unhindered thought.
Acknowledging that process reform and improvement must be continuous and taken seriously regardless of who is watching should be our goal as a world-class learner-centered University. The fact that these and many other unnatural behaviors occur suggest a norm we need to root out in the course of our University’s operations.
