Every 10 years, Saint Anselm College and colleges across the country receiving financial aid must draft a 100-page self-study and determine whether they are effective enough to continue as academic institutions.

However, it is up to the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) to make the final decision to keep the college up and running. NECHE, previously called NEASC, is an accreditor specifically for the New England region. Accreditors like NECHE are able to determine whether colleges can receive financial aid, and when that is denied, schools are put on probation and risk closing down.

There are nine standards that NECHE uses to judge the College’s fitness for accreditation such as its mission as an academic institution. In addition to reading the study, NECHE sends a truth-checking team that will question whether the mission stated in the study is clear and has been formally adopted and followed by a college. Although NECHE mandates that a college has a mission, they don’t dictate what that mission has to be. In other words, as long as a college is following its mission, NECHE will continue accrediting that college.

Professor Beth Salerno is the History Department Chair. She also serves as Co-Chair for the committee responsible for the self-study, along with the Chair, Associate Dean of the College, Christine Gustafson.

Salerno and Gustafson posted the current draft of the self-study on the portal for the college community to view upon request. They have also made a slideshow with the nine standards for people who have less time to read, but Salerno highly suggests they should.

Besides an institution’s mission, the remaining standards are as follows: planning and evaluation, organization and governance, academics, students, teaching and learning, institutional resources, educational effectiveness, and integrity.

After the community views these standards, Salerno says she and Gustafson are “hopeful people will focus on what interests them, so if you’re really interested in how we are living our Catholic, Benedictine tradition: standard one. If you’re really interested in students: standard five.”

In addition to the chairs, there is a steering committee of 16, with one or two people responsible for each standard. There are also four or five people under the steering committee for each standard, for a total of around 60 people. Gustafson says that it takes more than just a few people to create this report, “it’s a pretty comprehensive effort, every office on campus has been involved in one way or another.”

“The good part is almost every single division on campus is represented… [and] the reason we did that is because we felt it was crucially important that the self-study reflect the full campus experience,” says Salerno.

Now that the first draft of the study is available, Salerno is positive Saint Anselm will be re-accredited. She says, “our real strength is that we are doing many things well and the things we’re not doing well, we know about it, we recognize it and we have a plan for fixing it.”

Salerno assures that Saint Anselm is not the only college that faces difficulties. She says, “No institution can do everything well all the time…That’s like asking a student to be an A student on every single day, but what makes an A student is you work regularly, you work hard and when you’re not good at something, you figure out how to fix it.”

The areas that the college excels in are academics, the student experience, graduation, and retention. It struggles in connecting long-term planning and budgeting.

However, the college has transitioned well into a new governance system that NECHE did not see in the past. Until the day the 2009 visiting team arrived, the monks owned the college and ran it with cooperation and input from the faculty and an Advisory Board.

In 2009, the system changed to a governing board consisting of a “four-legged stool” of monks, faculty, Administrators, and the Board of Trustees.

Salerno says, “Now that [we] have multiple groups, that’s better, it’s more inclusive, but it means people really have to communicate.”

In addition to this one governance change from 2009, Stephen DiSalvo, Ph.D., became Saint Anselm’s first non-monk president in 2012.

However, Saint Anselm College has many aspects that are highlighted in the report as well. Gustafson states “we have a really strong sense of mission here at this college, that everybody buys into and provides a sense of common purpose. Our students understand what it is, they respond to it. As do the faculty, as do the staff and administration, and it is a source of strength.”

Although Salerno says both changes have gone pretty well, “like any big changes, you have to learn a lot of lessons” and now that the college is doing a search for a new president, “we’ll have to learn from that too.”

Part of the reason for the self-study is to serve as a reflective process, such as how the last Presidential search went and what the college can do better for this next search.

Salerno says, “You don’t write a 100-page self-study just to get re-accredited, you do it so that you can pause and really take a good look on the institution: how have the last ten years gone and how can you make the next ten better?”