Students walk along the covered walkway near the University Library last Tuesday on the Edinburg campus. MARIO GONZALEZ/THE RIDER
While the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley remains accredited, the institution brass is working to fix the school’s probationary status.
In December, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges placed UTRGV under a yearlong probation for failure to demonstrate compliance with several accreditation standards.
SACSCOC is the regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting higher education institutions in the Southern states.
UTRGV President Guy Bailey and Deputy President Janna Arney met with SACSCOC officials in early February, where they spoke about the next steps in the process.
“We talked about the next steps and moving forward and the kind of things we needed to do to get off probation,” Bailey said in a phone interview with The Rider last Thursday. “We had a great discussion and we’re moving forward with their suggestions. They’re being extremely helpful, so things are going quite well.”
Arney said “SACSCOC is absolutely committed, as we are, to working together through this process.”
Bailey said some of the technical issues about the transition have already been resolved with SACSCOC. What the university is doing right now is handling some of the communication issues, most of which had to do with the website.
“Currently, what we’re doing is revising some of the things on our website that were inaccurate,” Bailey said. “Here’s the problem: When we put our website together, we did it at various times beginning in 2014. By the time we opened as a university, things had changed dramatically and we had not had time to update the website. SACSCOC pointed out some inaccuracies in the website, so we’re scrubbing that, going through and revising the website and doing things like that.”
Havidán Rodríguez, UTRGV provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, explained what the issues were regarding the university website.
“One of the issues that we’ve been dealing with, in terms of the transition to UTRGV, ensuring that we are referring to the appropriate institutions that form part of UTRGV and that we make references to the partnerships,” Rodríguez said. “If our website by any chance, let me use an example, ‘The University of Texas at Brownsville in 2015 was under x, y or z,’ they would come back and say that’s wrong because in 2015 there was no UTB, there was a UTB/Texas Southmost College. That was the institution that was accredited by SACSCOC. It wasn’t UTB, it wasn’t TSC, it was UTB/TSC. We’re just trying to make sure that we’re consistent in the way that we convey that information and that we have a correct and accurate historical account of how the transition to UTRGV occurred.”
In October, a SACSCOC special committee will visit the UTRGV campuses to determine an agenda, what people they want to meet with and what type of information the university will need to provide. The university will then be able to respond and provide information needed to clarify any issues, concerns or answer any questions.
In December 2017, UTRGV will be reviewed by SACSCOC’s board of trustees, which will consider the accreditation status of the university following review of a monitoring report submitted by the institution addressing the standards cited for non-compliance, and the report of a special committee that will visit the institution in October.
“As we’ve said, we’re working extremely hard collaborating with SACSCOC to try to ensure that the probationary status is lifted in the December meeting, although we can’t guarantee that. That’s not a decision that corresponds to us. We’re working hard to ensure that does happen,” Rodríguez said.
