NCA Accreditation Team 5 (Engagement & Service)
Meeting Minutes: December 11, 2003

Guest: Margo Anderson, Chair Team 1 (Mission & Integrity)

Margo Anderson began with a presentation and discussion of issues with relevance to our team that the Mission and Integrity team have been addressing. These included:

-Questions concerning the interpretation and existence of foundational documents
-Questions about the structures that operationalize the content of mission statements
-Discovery of the tremendous amounts of ambiguity about authority for these documents (including periodic review and revision)
-Ambiguity about “board” representation of UWM
-How to define and operationalize “integrity” (our group had a lot of input on this point—paying attention to what we say we do versus the reality of what we do; measuring congruence/dissonance)

We also discussed the implications of the mission statements for our team's discussions of constituencies—how do these documents help us to identify our relevant constituencies. The consensus: zero in on the UWM mission statement, not State or system or doctoral cluster statements of mission.

Team 5B submitted a draft of their content, and Team 5C's draft was recirculated.

Some additional data requests were identified (e.g., Divisional criteria, merit and workload report formats; feasibility of locating “engagement” data on the T-form for funded activities). It was also noted that the L&S has a coding system for courses with internship components and that the data are easily tracked this way.

We discussed some issues around integrity as applied to engagement and service—for example, noting that Milwaukee is now a “minority majority” city, how do we reflect this fact in our engagement efforts/activities?

The team's role in reporting versus helping plan for the future was discussed, with the consensus that we need to make suggestions for future actions/directions, but not do the actual detailed planning for these changes.

It was suggested, again, that our team members re-read the Portland State guidelines.

NEXT MEETING: Thursday, January 22 from 1-2:30 (place to be announced)