The Brown & White

Strategic thinking. Rigorous self-assessment. Continuous improvement.

These concepts are practiced every day at firms large and small across the Lehigh Valley and around the world.

They are also our focus at Lehigh, where we are soon concluding a three-year process to renew our accreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the agency responsible for our institutional accreditation.

This may seem like some arcane exercise practiced by academicians secured away in their ivory tower. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like the most efficient and effective corporations, we have spent considerable time and effort examining our internal policies and procedures to determine whether they align with Lehigh's mission and goals and reflect the current needs of our students and society. In those cases where gaps have been identified, we have developed comprehensive recommendations to close them.

The centerpiece of the accreditation renewal process is a rigorous self-study that has been critical in our drive to make a stronger Lehigh. The recommendations falling out of it are linked to our mission of advancing learning through the integration of teaching, research and service, as well as to recent strategic thinking initiatives launched by President Alice Gast. We focused on three key areas: students' first-year experience, technology support and advancement of student learning.

The accreditation process includes a review of our self-study by our peers. Peer review is a hallmark of scholarship. It is how human knowledge advances. Accreditation applies peer review to an institutional scale.

By providing documentation and evidence of our compliance with standards and our institutional improvement efforts, the academic community and, by extension, society at large hold us accountable to our mission. The peer review also gives us an external perspective on our challenges and opportunities to improve.

Lehigh has an obligation to our students, our alumni, our community and society at large to be the strongest institution possible.

The accreditation process has been a transforming catalyst in this effort. Because of the rigor, comprehensiveness and candor involved in examining our own priorities, policies and procedures, and in ensuring that we are in compliance with Middle States' standards, we are a better university today than when we started the process. Work to pursue the self-study's recommendations will make us even better.

Higher education is under increasing public scrutiny with respect to outcomes. The accreditation process demonstrates our accountability to internal and external stakeholders. Through clear-eyed, good-faith efforts to complete the Middle States self-study, we have identified what we're doing right and made recommendations on where and how we can improve. Equally important, our follow-up to this process engages us in ongoing self-improvement and assessment to ensure alignment with institutional goals and mission. Accreditation is not a one-time thing that can be shelved for another 10 years.

We welcome accreditation because, in the end, it makes Lehigh a better university. A better Lehigh, in turn, makes the Lehigh Valley, the nation and indeed the world better. Our graduates will be better-prepared to create solutions to problems and make judgments that affect the lives and well-being of others.

A better university is a better validation of society's commitment to preserve higher education as a process that cultivates the mind and the spirit for the sake of civilization - not only the heritage of civilization but the future, whose inhabitants will judge us for how we have prepared the world for their habitation and for how we have prepared them to inhabit it.