Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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If anyone here has any influence on or knows someone who can influence the ALA’s Committee on Accreditation, and can comment on the quality of the curriculum at the College of St. Catherine or upon any student in this program, I would really appreciate it if you/they contact the COA regarding its decision not to award the College of St. Catherine ALA accreditation for its Master’s of Library and Information Science program, and urge the Committee to reconsider this decision.
Apparently, this decision has shocked even ALA staff, including the accreditation team that was sent to interview us. The COA admits that its decision has nothing to do with the quality of the curriculum or of our professors, who I think have been insulted and humiliated by this dispatch. My professors, my dean, and the President of the college are scrambling to find options for us, rather than allow the COA to doom the careers of hundreds of students at a stroke of the pen. I am so honored to attend this outstanding school in the face of a decision that, in my opinion, risks making ALA accreditation mean nothing.
The COA has apparently done this before, withholding accreditation (we apply again in 2012, too late for me) to the utter mystification of even prominent librarians and archivists, or issuing only three- or four-year accreditation status instead of the standard seven-year without sufficient explanation.
If my school, the only school in Minnesota to offer a chance at an ALA-accredited degree, does not get this accreditation then my Master’s is not worth the paper it is written on, and I will remain “unqualified” for the majority of the positions offered a candidate with an MLIS. I could not work at the Smithsonian, any college or university library or archives, or in most private/corporate institutions. Among the options that I am now weighing is the prospect of not continuing with my Master’s, and swallowing three years of study while working (until last December) full-time, and giving up on this career path.
I spent a sleepless night last night!
I would appreciate anything that anyone could do. Thank you.
P.S. There are many issues of injustice in higher education. Conspiracy to "expel" intelligent design is not one of them. Ask me sometime about “cultural capital” and how the educated get educated, whereas the more your family joins the military, the more your family joins the military. A truly brave person would have made a documentary about how Americans vaunt these supposed “rags to riches” stories while social mobility is becoming less and less possible in the United States, and social class is a taboo subject. (But that would have required too much abstract thinking, I fear.) 
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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at least until the final decision in April. (At any rate, it looks like people have already contacted the Committee liaison with specifics about how St. Kate's fulfills the ALA standards.)
