The Council of Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is the single agency
commissioned by the United States Department of Education to govern the body of
regional accreditors in the United States. This agency has been called ―the accreditor or
accreditors.‖ In its list of effective accreditation practices, CHEA (March 2010) also
recommends extensive faculty involvement in accreditation: ―accrediting associations
work to broaden and intensify faculty participation in accreditation review, benefiting
from their expertise in deciding and judging goals and evidence for student achievement‖
(p. 2). In a later report published by CHEA (September 2010), participants [in a meeting
called by CHEA with higher education accreditors, administrators, faculty, staff, and
students] expressed the need for faculty to be more involved in the accreditation process
but went on to ―indicate that [faculty] are [already] ‗consumed‘ by accreditation, with
time and other resources diverted from the vital task of serving students‖ (p. 4). So while
there is a need for more faculty involvement, faculty feel that the time spent on
accreditation tasks could be better spent on the constituents who faculty consider to be
their primary responsibility, students. Palomba and Banta (1999) agree that students and
subsequently, the assessment of their learning, should be the primary role of faculty at
any institution of higher learning. They believe that when the assessment of student
learning is paramount in the duties of faculty members, it is then that faculty members are
able to see assessment as more than another activity to complete for accreditation but
important and worthwhile. Though a conflict in priority between administrators and