Accreditation Probation for Country’s Two Largest HBCUs
Institutions must address laundry lists of issues after the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ meeting last month.
By Marlon A. Walker
The country’s second-largest historically Black university received a laundry list of issues it needs to address in the next year impeding full accreditation, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools officials said at its annual meeting in New Orleans last month.
Texas Southern University joined the nation’s largest HBCU — Florida A&M University — and Bishop State Community College in Alabama on the list of HBCUs placed on probation by SACS’s Commission on Colleges.
FAMU, which was put on probation last summer, has had its probation extended another six months to address several issues to gain full reaccreditation. Only one item on the school’s list of 10 areas of noncompliance — filling vacancies on its board of trustees — had been addressed, according to information received by SACS from the university.
Dr. Belle Wheelan, president of the Commission on Colleges, says the list of issues to be rectified may actually be shorter because of a clean audit FAMU received just before SACS met.
“Their audit didn’t get in on time,” she says. “Some of those (issues) perhaps could have been cleared up.”
FAMU received its first clean audit in three years before the accreditation announcement, a sure sign that things are turning around for the 120-year-old university. President James H. Ammons also notes the school’s accreditation status was hindered by the commission’s not having the school’s latest audit in its hands at its annual meeting.
