Every ten years, the University is subject to a review of its accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. We are now at the start of that process. It will entail the development of a self-study report, work on which has begun and will continue into the next two academic years, and visits by an evaluation team in the fall of 2013 and in April 2014. This is an important event in the life of an institution: a time to examine its goals and programs, to obtain advice and validation from peers at other institutions, and to seek public reaffirmation by its regional accrediting agency.
I am pleased to announce the appointment of the Steering Committee which will guide our self-study process and also to announce that, as he did in 2004 for our last Middle States Self-Study, Norman Dorsen, Counselor to the President and Stokes Professor of Law, has agreed to chair this effort.
Although many institutions, particularly small colleges, engage in a comprehensive self-study, large institutions like NYU use a format which Middle States calls the selected topics approach. Both approaches rely primarily on faculty. Our self-study will focus on multi-school programs. Given the increasing interdisciplinarity of knowledge, it is essential to our overall academic enterprise to examine how we integrate our educational offerings and research activities. The work of the Steering Committee, and the working groups that will participate in the self-study, will be of key importance as we develop plans for the future of NYU and shape its programs to meet challenges to come.
The members of the Steering Committee are: