[Vision2020] Academic Accreditation and New St. Andrews College

[Nicholas Gier]

In a letter to the Daily News on May 22, Dean Roy Atwood was not very transparent about the accreditation status of New St. Andrews College (NSA).  For those not familiar with the process of accreditation (that would be most readers), Atwood gave the impression that his college was accredited by the Council on Higher Education and the U. S. Department of Education.  These organizations only recognize individual accrediting agencies; they are not involved in accreditation at all.

Atwood failed to mention two facts: (1) NSA's accreditation agency is the Transnational Association of Christian Schools and Colleges; and (2) NSA is only a candidate for accreditation.  This agency lists only 30 schools on its fully accredited list. Perhaps this agency has just begun business, but it appears to be a very low level agency for academic recognition. None of the good Christian liberal arts colleges are on this list. 

While disguising the identity of NSA's agency, Atwood does mention the association by which he would prefer to be recognized, the one that does represent good Christian liberal arts schools.  For example, only a couple of schools in our Pacific Northwest Division of the American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature (of which I'm outgoing president) are on the Transnational list and all the rest are on other more reputable lists.

As a former director of the UI School of Communication, Atwood knows what it takes to be a respectable academic institution.  Atwood himself has an outstanding publication record.  Most faculty members across the nation provide online links for their CVs, but I have found nothing of the sort on the NSA website.  Some of their books are listed, but no publisher is mentioned, which leads me to assume that these books are from Canon Press.  Why does a good scholar such as Atwood not hold his faculty to the highest scholarly standards?

Roy Atwood himself put the reputation of Canon Press into question by admitting that the slavery booklet, published in the monograph series along with Jones' racism piece, was not a scholarly work. The monograph series of any press is usually the place where the best work is published. Presumably the books published by Canon Press are not sent out for external review as other good presses do as a matter of professional protocol. UI professors are promoted on the basis of external peer review, and their publications must contain a substantial number of books and articles reviewed by readers not known to them.

If I were an outside reviewer of NSA’s status as an academic institution, I would be concerned about the following:

1. Two thirds of its faculty do not have PhDs.  A while back the faculty got substantial pay increases, and I have heard that college fund raising has been very successful.  NSA apparently has the resources to hire PhDs., but chooses not to do so.

2. Two of the senior fellows do not have PhDs.  At the UI a PhD is required at the lowest rank, assistant professor, and I know of only a very few exceptional professors in the humanities anywhere who are full professors without the PhD.

3. Although CVs are not available, it appears that most of the faculty’s published books are from Canon Press, Doug Wilson’s own creation.  Wilson has published his classical Christian school book by an outside publisher and Peter Leithart has very respectable publication list, but I’m not sure about the others.

4. Of special concern is the fact that Doug’s Wilson brother, his son, and his son-in-law are on the faculty, holding positions that should be filled by PhDs .

The people at NSA claim that they uphold the highest traditions of academic excellence, but parading around in caps and gowns, writing nasty critiques of all philosophers and theologians who don’t agree with them, sponsoring a history conference with no professional historians as major speakers, and misleading the public about its accreditation status, does not bode well for their future as a truly academic institution.

P.S.  I e-mailed Atwood several weeks ago, giving him a chance to clarify NSA's status in his own letter to the editor, but, as far as I know, he has not done that.  I've not checked the Daily News on line for the past two days, so perhaps he finally did.