This week I had an amazing time not only attending but presenting and facilitating sessions at the 2025 Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) conference. The theme was “Quality Assurance in an Era of Change: Reflect, Reimagine, Recommit” and we did just that. I feel so grateful to have spent time around accreditation warriors and government professionals who could really speak to what is continuing to unfold in front of us and provide encouraging words for us all.
There’s a wonderful sense of learning and community in this space that I always always look forward to since at most of our education research conferences, the accreditation people are few and far between.
And finally, there were so many moments of feeling reaffirmed (this has to count as an accreditation pun) after I presented pieces from my written piece as a fellow paired with some supporting data from my dissertation and people were excited to share with their institutions, their state legislature and echoed sentiments of the research participants.
It was an honor to shift a conversation of around the emerging accreditation “marketplace” playing out in the US to focus on our HBCUs and discuss how we cannot be left out of the thought process in policy making and change. Asking the question, what does it really cost, and is that cost worth it?
I wear the title of HBCU scholar very proudly, but also I understand the responsibility to our institutions and to our students in this role. Thank you CHEA for having me, not only as a 2023 fellow but as a budding accreditation researcher and scholar. I am committed and will continue to reflect, reimagine and recommit to quality assurance and continuous improvement.
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Thank you to Marta van Zanten and Sean Tackett for collaborating on a really great topic and teaching me so much about med education accreditation abroad!
Thank you Cynthia Jackson Hammond and the entire CHEA Team and congratulations on another wonderful conference.
