Faculty Consultative Committee University policies need to be written in plain English. They need to be readily accessible to every faculty and staff member. If we want accountability, we must provide standards that people understand and can find. It should also reform University policies. We could take a lesson from that.
Accountability requires understanding.
Understanding requires language that is simple and direct. It says what it means, and is not dependent upon some special definition buried somewhere else in the document. Accessibility means more than making policies available on the Internet or in book form. It means organizing that material in ways that are meaningful to the users. Present policies are organized in ways that are meaningful primarily to the bureaucracies that administer them, not to the faculty and staff who must comply with them.