SACS visit ends despite adverse winter weather
By Crystal Forester and Sarah Krebs
Staff Reporters

The visitors from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools adjourned after a four-day visit, Chancellor Michael Ferrari said Thursday.

“The visit was favorable, as we expected,” Ferrari said. “I was disappointed that the site visitors did not have a true TCU experience.”

Icy streets and cold temperatures did not stop SACS visitors from conducting their site visit this week, but it did cause on-campus interviews to be canceled or rescheduled, Ferrari said.

Ferrari said he met with the vice chancellors, cabinet officers, Bonnie Melhart, Bob Seal and the visiting team to listen to the visiting teams oral report before they were excused.
The visitors made recommendations that point out areas that TCU must fix to be in consent with the SACS criteria, said Melhart, director of the SACS self-study. The visiting team also made suggestions about things they think TCU could improve, but do not necessarily have to do, she said.

All of the meetings with students, faculty and administrators were rescheduled and moved to a later time due to the weather, Melhart said.

“They met with students from all disciplines,” Melhart said. “We had various kinds of people so we got some students here for lunch each day and we paired them up with the people they needed to speak with.”

Instead of conducting individual interviews throughout the day, the self-study committee decided to invite students to lunch and conduct several interviews at once, Melhart said.

“We’ve done the best we can to get them to see the kinds of people they were going to meet with,” Melhart said. “They haven’t met with exactly the people we had lined up interviews with because some of them were far away.”

The visitors did not fully explore the campus, but a few of them toured buildings, such as the Sid W. Richardson Building, Mary Couts Burnett Library and Moudy Building South, Melhart said.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, the SACS visitors met with about 15 to 20 faculty members, and by 5 p.m., the visitors had all of the information they needed to write their reports, said Seal, associate director of the SACS self-study.

“They read our self-study report before they came and they are basically verifying what we wrote,” Seal said.

The visiting team chairman, Tom Corts, president of Samford University, will put together the report that TCU will receive in a few weeks, Ferrari said. SACS will then give TCU about five months to go back and review or clarify any problems that need to be fixed, he said.

The reaffirmation of the SACS accreditation of TCU will be announced in December after the Commission on Colleges of SACS meets, Seal said.

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