JHU meets criteria

Johns Hopkins University received reaccreditation this summer after a two-year process evaluating the university and its undergraduate experience.

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education announced the university's reaccredidation in mid-June. The decision stemmed from a report produced by a 14-member team that visited Hopkins in March.

"They approved us without qualification or without exception," said Paul Burger, dean of undergraduate education, who has overseen the effort to improve the undergraduate experience. She said the reaccredidation process -- which takes place every 10 years -- is important to the university's reputation and qualifies the institution for federal aid.

"It would be a public embarrassment not to be accredited," she said. "The loss of federal aid would be extraordinary painful."

The 14-member board, led by Brown University President Ruth Simmons, was comprised of university faculty and administrators from peer institutions, such as Yale, MIT and Stanford.

The university chose to focus the reaccreditation process on its efforts to improve undergraduate education, explained in a report produced by the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) in May 2003, Burger said.

The 14-member Middle States team met with students and faculty members from all five Johns Hopkins schools that have an undergraduate population, including the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering.

The commission praised the University's CUE report, which Burger called the University's blue print for undergraduate improvements over the next few years.

The Middle States report also praised the University for having implemented many of the improvements suggested in the CUE report.

The Middle States report called Johns Hopkins "an exemplar of excellence in research-intensive learning."

"They understood the distinctive character of this institution," Burger said. "We are not a clone. We have our distinctive character to our undergraduate education."

The Middle States report also suggested some improvements to the schools' faculty and to the undergraduate experience.

The commission said the university needs to increase its faculty's diversity and improve communication with minority faculty.

It also pointed to alleged cheating and lack of academic integrity, an issue which Burger said is a problem at most universities and that Johns Hopkins is already taking action to address.

The report also suggested that advanced majors be given more access to smaller classes and closer interaction with professors, proposing that every student should be guaranteed two courses in his or her major with no more than 20 attendees.

The commission recommended more focus groups fostering conversation between school officials and students to address the issue of student life. It also advised more activities to encourage school spirit. Burger said this has been addressed with events such as the freshman flag raising and the fall festival.

The Middle State report praised Hopkins' combination of research and teaching to add to the value of the undergraduate experience. Also, it found that students were satisfied with internship and off-campus opportunities.

"It was a health process, a constructive one," Burger said. "It allowed us to energize this initiative across campus to look at undergraduate education."