These norms have long guided this University and our various accrediting agencies. The legal staff of the President's Office put language into the motion that the trustees voted to establish the school, that exempts the operation of the school and its deans from these norms. The school's cognate faculty is not clearly specified, the school reports not to a chancellor, but to a non-academic unit. The faculty to be affiliated with the school have no role in evaluating the deans or their faculty colleagues. Quality control in admissions and degree programs is vested, not in the faculty, but in the deans.
Degrees are to be awarded in the name of four campuses.
These issues will need to be re-visited in the fall when the senate is asked to approve the new M.S. and Ph.D. programs for the school. The faculty of this campus will have to decide whether these departures from nationally accepted governance norms will provide an academic environment supportive of high quality graduate programs.